Milo, a Fully Autonomous Indoor/Outdoor Robotic Guide Dog
Blind and low-vision individuals often rely on guide dogs for navigation, but these animals are expensive and have limited availability. Milo is a fully autonomous, low-cost robotic guide dog built on the Unitree Go2 platform, designed for indoor and outdoor use without prior environmental knowledge.
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[Submitted on 21 Jul 2026]
Title:Milo, a Fully Autonomous Indoor/Outdoor Robotic Guide Dog
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Abstract:Many Blind and Low-Vision (BLV) people rely on guide dogs for moment-to-moment navigation, such as staying on path and avoiding obstacles and pedestrians. However, guide dogs are expensive to acquire and maintain (approximately \$50k USD plus ongoing costs), often involve long waiting lists, and have relatively short life expectancies. While robot guide dogs offer a promising alternative, existing approaches exploring this idea suffer from several drawbacks: They often lack the autonomy required for real-world deployment, relying on prior 3D scans of the environment, external computation, or limited awareness of the handler. In this work, we present Milo, the first open-source, low-cost (approximately \$2k USD) robotic guide dog platform capable of fulfilling the basic collaborative navigation role expected of a guide dog. Milo is fully autonomous, requiring no a priori knowledge of the environment, completely self-contained with all computation performed onboard, and suitable for both indoor and outdoor navigation while avoiding obstacles and pedestrians. Our system consists of a modified Unitree Go2 robot (equipped with onboard compute, sensors, and a handle), a perception stack combining voxel mapping with floor, obstacle, and pedestrian detection, and a navigation stack based on an obstacle-avoidance policy trained in a custom bird's-eye-view simulator. We evaluate Milo in real indoor and outdoor obstacle courses and compare it against a costmap-based baseline, demonstrating smoother navigation and fewer handler collisions. To maximize accessibility for BLV users, we release both the robot hardware instructions and the complete software stack as open source.
Comments: Submitted to CoRL 2026. The Milo project website is available here: this https URL
Subjects:
Robotics (cs.RO)
Cite as: arXiv:2607.19530 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2607.19530v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.19530
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Florian Golemo [view email] [v1] Tue, 21 Jul 2026 19:19:23 UTC (13,896 KB)
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