MateRobot: Material Recognition in Wearable Robotics for People with Visual Impairments
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Wearable robotics can improve the lives of People with Visual Impairments (PVI) by providing additional sensory information. Blind people typically recognize objects through haptic perception. However, knowing materials before touching is under-explored in the field of assistive technology. To fill this gap, in this work, a wearable robotic system, MateRobot, is established for PVI to recognize materials before hand. Specially, the human-centric system can perform pixel-wise semantic segmentation of objects and materials. Considering both general object segmentation and material segmentation, an efficient MateViT architecture with Learnable Importance Sampling (LIS) and Multi-gate Mixture-of-Experts (MMoE) is proposed to wearable robots to achieve complementary gains from different target domains. Our methods achieve respective 40.2 previous method with +5.7 participants, our wearable system obtains a score of 28 in NASA-Task Load Index, indicating low cognitive demands and ease of use. Our MateRobot demonstrates the feasibility of recognizing material properties through visual cues, and offers a promising step towards improving the functionality of wearable robots for PVI. Code will be available at: https://github.com/JunweiZheng93/MATERobot.
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