CANINE: AI Coaching System for Robot Guide Dog Training

Researchers have developed CANINE, an automated coaching system that trains visually impaired users to navigate with a robot guide dog through personalized verbal feedback. The system decomposes complex coordination tasks into sub-skills and operates at two levels: high-level tracking of learner proficiency across sub-skills using knowledge tracing to prioritize weak areas, and low-level observation of practice episodes to infer error causes via foundation models and generate targeted corrections. A controlled study demonstrated its effectiveness. The work addresses the challenge that effective human-robot coordination is difficult to learn from generic instructions alone.