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Professor of spatial computing Nick Giudice played a key role as a contributor to an award-winning paper about developing robot guide dogs to assist the visually impaired.

The paper – which is titled “Toward Robotic Companions: Understanding Handler-Guide Dog Interactions for Informed Guide Dog Robot Design” and can be found  – came from a study led by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It won a Best Paper Award at CHI 2024: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the leading venue for human-computer interaction research. You can find the full UMass Amherst story .

While Giudice was not a primary investigator on this project, his combination of expertise and experience make him an ideal fit for this project.

“I have spent a lot of my career working on new tech for improving spatial awareness, navigation, and information access for blind and low vision people. I have also been a guide dog user for over 30 years,” said Giudice. “The combination of these personal and professional interests gives me a perspective on developing smart guiding technology that most people simply do not have.

“This lived experience provides me a lot of insight of what tech works and what doesn’t and what problems truly exist when navigating for blind folks – insight that is critical for designing solutions that avoid what I call the ‘engineering trap’ and creating tools that actually make a difference.”

Read more .