Beyond Canes and Guide Dogs: A Review of 40 Years of Robotics for Wayfinding, Navigating, and Orienting Assistance for People with Visual Impairments

Robotic aids that enrich the lives of Persons with Visual Impairments (PwVI) are becoming increasingly popular. Their development is motivated by the significant navigational challenges faced by PwVI, which negatively impact their independence and quality of life. Additionally, traditional tools such as white canes, guide dogs, and tactile maps, although useful, lack the adaptability and situational awareness that robots can provide. This survey presents the first comprehensive review of robotic solutions for wayfinding, spanning over 150 works in the past 40 years. We propose unifying definitions of wayfinding and robotic wayfinding drawing from the fields of robotics, human factors, urban theory, and several other social sciences, and provide a rigorous classification along the axes of embodiment, communication, sensing, and user evaluation. Informed by the gaps in the literature, we provide a critical analysis of six research questions, including factors in device design trends, evolution of unidirectional and bidirectional communication mediums, and robustness of system evaluations and user studies. Furthermore, we analyze and compare state-of-the-art approaches spanning human-robot interaction, advanced perception pipelines, and experimental design. We identify limitations and open challenges for developing robotic wayfinding solutions and outline recommendations for future research directions. The full annotated dataset and detailed taxonomy for all surveyed papers are published in the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) repository: https://doi.org/10.3886/E235425V1. Additional resources can be found on our project website: https://wayfinding-robots.github.io.