In principle, it would be possible to mount a full keyboard on the robot. The other keys are located with respect to the middle key. A small bump on the keypad's middle key (key 5) allows the blind user to locate it. Both types are relayed through a bluetooth headphone. The robot gives two types of messages to the user: synthesized speech or audio icons. The shopper communicates with RoboCart using the Belkin 9-key numeric keypad (See Figure 1 right). If the shopper is stranded at a location in the supermarket selecting a product, the shopper may feel uncomfortable or may negatively affect the shopper traffic. This task becomes time critical in opportunistic grocery shopping when the shopper does not have a prepared list of products. In this paper, we focus on Step 1 that requires the shopper to select a product from the repository of thousands of products, thereby communicating the next target destination to RobotCart. Steps 2, 3, and 4 were addressed in our previous publications ( Gharpure & Kulyukin 2008, Kulyukin 2007, Kulyukin & Gharpure 2006). RoboCart's operation includes four steps: 1) the blind shopper (henceforth the shopper) selects a product 2) the robot guides the shopper to the shelf with the product 3) the shopper finds the product on the shelf, places it in the basket mounted on the robot, and either selects another product or asks the robot to take him to a cash register 4) the robot guides the shopper to the cash register and then to the exit. In our previous research, we developed RoboCart, a robotic shopping cart for the visually impaired ( Gharpure, 2008, Kulyukin et al., 2008, Kulyukin et al., 2005). The research reported in this chapter describes our work on robot-assisted shopping for the blind.
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