# Robotic Guide Dog: Leading a Human with Leash-Guided Hybrid Physical Interaction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.14300 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14300/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Mar 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [DRAGON: A Dialogue-Based Robot for Assistive Navigation with Visual Language Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06924/) (2023)
- [System Configuration and Navigation of a Guide Dog Robot: Toward Animal Guide Dog-Level Guiding Work](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13368/) (2022)
- [Autonomous Navigation for Quadrupedal Robots with Optimized Jumping through Constrained Obstacles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00773/) (2021)
- [Space-Aware Instruction Tuning: Dataset and Benchmark for Guide Dog Robots Assisting the Visually Impaired](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07183/) (2025)
- [Flying Guide Dog: Walkable Path Discovery for the Visually Impaired Utilizing Drones and Transformer-based Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07007/) (2021)
- [From Obstacles to Etiquette: Robot Social Navigation with VLM-Informed Path Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09002/) (2026)
- [Transforming a Quadruped into a Guide Robot for the Visually Impaired: Formalizing Wayfinding, Interaction Modeling, and Safety Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14055/) (2023)
- [GuideNav: User-Informed Development of a Vision-Only Robotic Navigation Assistant For Blind Travelers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06147/) (2025)
- [Seeing-Eye Quadruped Navigation with Force Responsive Locomotion Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04370/) (2023)
- [ShelfHelp: Empowering Humans to Perform Vision-Independent Manipulation Tasks with a Socially Assistive Robotic Cane](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20501/) (2024)
- [Collaborative Navigation and Manipulation of a Cable-towed Load by Multiple Quadrupedal Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14424/) (2022)
- [DogSurf: Quadruped Robot Capable of GRU-based Surface Recognition for Blind Person Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03156/) (2024)
- [CANINE: Coaching Visually Impaired Users for Interactive Navigation with a Robot Guide Dog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19501/) (2026)
- [Synthetic data augmentation for robotic mobility aids to support blind and low vision people](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11164/) (2024)
- [Lightweight and Resource-Efficient Perception for Robotic Guide Dogs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03187/) (2026)
- [NavAble: A Large-Scale Dataset and Synthetic Data Generation Pipeline for Blind Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19330/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

An autonomous robot that is able to physically guide humans through narrow and cluttered spaces could be a big boon to the visually-impaired. Most prior robotic guiding systems are based on wheeled platforms with large bases with actuated rigid guiding canes. The large bases and the actuated arms limit these prior approaches from operating in narrow and cluttered environments. We propose a method that introduces a quadrupedal robot with a leash to enable the robot-guiding human system to change its intrinsic dimension (by letting the leash go slack) in order to fit into narrow spaces. We propose a hybrid physical Human-Robot Interaction model that involves leash tension to describe the dynamical relationship in the robot-guiding human system. This hybrid model is utilized in a mixed-integer programming problem to develop a reactive planner that is able to utilize slack-taut switching to guide a blind-folded person to safely travel in a confined space. The proposed leash-guided robot framework is deployed on a Mini Cheetah quadrupedal robot and validated in experiments.