Multi-objective or multi-destination path planning is crucial for mobile robotics applications such as mobility as a service, robotics inspection, and electric vehicle charging for long trips. This work proposes an anytime iterative system to concurrently solve the multi-objective path planning problem and determine the visiting order of destinations. The system is comprised of an anytime informable multi-objective and multi-directional RRT*algorithm to form a simple connected graph, and a solver that consists of an enhanced cheapest insertion algorithm and a genetic algorithm to solve approximately the relaxed traveling salesman problem in polynomial time. Moreover, a list of waypoints is often provided for robotics inspection and vehicle routing so that the robot can preferentially visit certain equipment or areas of interest. We show that the proposed system can inherently incorporate such knowledge to navigate challenging topology. The proposed anytime system is evaluated on large and complex graphs built for real-world driving applications. C++ implementations are available at: https://github.com/UMich-BipedLab/IMOMD-RRTStar.

User Experience Design (UX Design) comes from focusing on how products, in reality, affect the user's experience. In particular, the design of multi-modal interfaces for blind people facilitates the flexible and natural product or service capacity and improves blind people's interaction by overcoming the various existing constraints associated with any particular interaction. There have been various attempts to help visually impaired people appreciation of visual artwork, including multi-modal associations. However, these methods can only provide general information in terms of edge and pattern recognition by the sense of touch and restrained by the availability and number of specially developed artworks. We propose a novel method explaining visual artworks through image caption generation using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve artwork accessibility. This method can objectively describe any impressionism artwork used as a standalone description of art interpretation for blind people or can aide tactile-based methods. Based on end-to-end learning with a deep neural network, an encoder-decoder architecture model is adopted, and comprehensive experiments perform to confirm the stability of generated image captioning for stylized MS-COCO datasets with impressionism.

Jido is a conversational tactile map and a mobile application prototype to improve the orientation and mobility of visually impaired people. The tactile map can identify the user's touch gestures and their locations during tactile exploration to provide feedback. Users can verbally interact with a conversational agent through their mobile device to receive confirmation, request information of points of interest, and receive step-by-step instructions that can be later reviewed during navigation. In this work, we describe opportunities and challenges faced by tactile map users and present the findings on the preliminary evaluation of our prototype.