Lysa Robot Guide-Dog

According to the World Blind Union (WBU), around 253 million people in the world have some kind of visual impairment, knowing that of these, Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics says that around 6.5 million are Brazilians who faces exclusion due to lack of accessibility in closed spaces. The problem to be solved is the social exclusion of the visually impaired from the main pillars of society, such as politics, culture, education and the job market. Most people who develop this disability are from underdeveloped places, which makes the situation even worse since access to education, quality employment, leisure and health in these places are limited to certain groups. 

Lysa Robot Guide-Dog is a technological innovation based on a guide dog, which has GPS, cameras that identify objects and literally talk to the user, a mesh of sensors that deflects obstacles and a mature Artificial Intelligence that allows the mapping of locations through triangulation. Its handle is about one meter long, to ensure that any eventual collision does not hit the user. Lysa is portable, weighing about 2.5KG and can be handled by children as of 8 years old. It traces the path by voice command to the user and has a rechargeable battery that lasts about 8 hours. Unlike the traditional guide dog, it has an unlimited life span, ensures safety, autonomy and, consequently, social inclusion, besides having a lower cost, of R$ 15.000,00.

The lack of assistive technologies are factors which determine the decrease in the quality of life and the low access of people with visual impairment to the existential minimum, which is education, dignified work, health and well-being. The Instituto Inovar E Incluir stands out mainly for bringing more quality of life to thousands of visually impaired people in recent years for free through the constant deployment of the Lysa Robot Guide in private and public spaces through sales to the B2B market and through donations fostered by the awards.We to sell and donate our robot for public spaces, in indoor environments, to provide accessibility for visually impaired people to enter spaces that were not thought of or taken into account this group of people. We intend, with the money raised through awards and incentives, to promote accessibility in schools, hospitals, museums, airports, among other indoor environments, thinking about achieving a more inclusive society. Our connections and trust with the community are based on the guarantee of safety and autonomy for all users. Developing and implementing assistive technologies with Artificial Intelligence is essential to bring accessibility in these environments and allow these group to attend, in a safe, autonomous and inclusive manner, education, health environments and, consequently, to generate opportunities to get qualified jobs which generate a better income for their families, regarding equality and safety brought by a better mobility which assistive technologies contemplate. The Lysa, besides providing accessibility to the user, allows other people with disabilities to see these spaces being conquered and, in this way, generates representativeness, which, in turn, helps to overcome the ableism scenario.

The motivation to start this project was the desire of the founder, Neide Sellin, to propose an innovation that could change the world. Inspired while still a robotics teacher, she had a visually impaired student and thought of creating a robot based on a guide dog for the visually impaired. Then, Neide made her first prototype using recycled and low-cost materials. When she realized that the robot had a great approval by the users, that simple idea became a dream that could be realized, and could change millions of lives of visually impaired people.

We directly impact the lives of about 100,000 visually impaired people in the world, through a self-sustainable business, in which companies buy the robots for a low cost, along with the mapping of the environment and our support, to bring more accessibility to their customers and employees with visual disabilities. In this way, besides the accessibility for our target audience, it is also interesting for the companies. Each unit implemented by sales or donations, has the capacity to serve about 150 visually impaired people per year, improving their lives with more opportunities for quality employment in an independent and autonomous way so that they are able to give the best of the existential minimum to their families, especially in terms of health and social welfare.

We seek to expand our development team by implementing research and production, innovation, and new features, because our biggest challenge is to launch the Lysa in the market in an effective way that meets our audience in a broader way and with our current cash flow, we have difficulties in following up on our goals. For the production of 360 units, for example, we would need about US$ 103,153.84 because the parts are mostly found outside the country, i.e., currently about R$ 500,000.00, while only with human resources, the costs would be around R$ 1,000,000.00, values that we seek through fundraising and commercial viability of Lysa we seek financial capital via angel investors, Series B venture capital, venture builders and private equity.

We used the best software engineering practices to develop a robot equipped with a mature Artificial Intelligence that can map environments and help people with visual impairment or difficulty in locomotion in atypical environments to move around just by speaking the place where it wants to go, identifying objects on the way by image recognition. It has an unlimited life span and batteries that last for about 8 hours, weighs only 2.5 KG, with a handle of one meter away from the user, which is necessary to avoid accidents with sudden obstacles that may arise. There is a lack of direct competition, because there is no other technology that can provide this complete experience, raises our pioneering spirit with regard to innovation in assistive technologies. Our sales targets andinnovation updates put us ahead of any other innovation that may be our future competitor, but we understand that before then we will have already raised funds for our institute and ultimately donated several units around the world, emphasizing our recognition and further highlighting our product in the world market.

By reaching the market in a more massive way, our goal is to deliver to the market at least until the end of 2026 about 70,000 units.  Directly impacting the lives of about 350,000 visually impaired people, that is, about 5.4% of the visually impaired in Brazil or 0.14% of the world.  We practice a self-sustainable business, in which companies buy the robots for a low cost, along with the environment mapping and our support, to bring more accessibility to their customers and employees with visual impairment, generating more profits to establishments by expanding the customer base that is only possible from this technological upgrade, giving them more inclusion opportunities through increased mobility, meanwhile, we can use part of the profits from these sales, to make donations of units to the poorest visually impaired, along with all the necessary support, and maintain our employees and structure.

Initially 20 other visually impaired people were called to contribute with the idea, and this moment was of great impact, because, by seeing so many difficulties that these people went through in their daily lives, their renewed smiles gave the understanding that the technology could change the lives of thousands in the long term. We have not yet reached the final version of our product; we are in the process of maturing. We seek to improve effectiveness through daily development, proofs of concept (POCs), showcase events where we get feedbacks from users, request from customers about new features and ideas we haven't thought of internally.  In the implementation of Lysa at the Vitória airport we had problems with mapping and localization because of the high incidence of natural light, which hinders the sensors; therefore, new, more effective sensors were developed and purchased.

We estimate that the marginalization of these specific groups occurs mainly from poverty and social inequality that is derived mainly from the lack of investment in access and specialized development of education for these people and from the poor distribution of income in the country. In this sense, the Intersyndicate Department of Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies (DIEESE) estimated that in the period from January to August 2020, 849,000 formal jobs were closed in Brazil, according to data from the General Registry of Employed and Unemployed), of the Ministry of Economy. Of the total of closed jobs, 171.6 thousand (about 20%) were for people with disabilities. This number was derived from the COVID-19 pandemic, but it generated a significant drop in the return of these people to the job market, also dismissing professionals aimed at supporting blind people at work. This number is due to the fact that companies understand that the moderate degree of incapacity of these people may affect their productivity, that is why the hiring is mostly related to mandatory quotas and not by professional level, therefore, preparing these people for the market is essential for them to have full productivity capacity. In other words, there is a quite diversified range of jobs that can be performed by a blind or low vision individual. And, if performed in an environment appropriate to their needs, the work of this group of workers can reach high levels of productivity.  Therefore, the implantation and implementation of Lysa in the labor, education and health market will bring adaptation to receive employees, clients and visitors with some kind of visual impairment in an easier way, meanwhile, there will also be a significant increase of people with visual impairment enabled and positively impacted for a life of more inclusion and equality, however, measuring how to fit in a more positive way this innovation at this moment demands an effective application in the real market, through the collection and listing of indicators with the delimitation of impact, the benchmarking in these several areas of implementations.

Lysa, based on a robot guide dog, is a sophisticated technological innovation that features GPS, cameras that identify objects and literally talk to the user, a mesh of sensors that deflects obstacles, be they holes or objects in the air, and a mature Artificial Intelligence (AI) that allows mapping of locations through triangulation.

Lysa has the potential to change the Brazilian reality of exclusion and marginalization of people with visual impairment within the labor market, making the environments accessible, creating new audiences to consume and sell, impacting directly on the economic growth of the place. We can highlight the integration of small companies from underdeveloped countries into the industrial technological market of innovations based on robotic automation in a cheaper and faster way, so that in fact countries like Brazil have the same opportunities for economic growth by industrial region with more developed technologies. This inclusion and permanence of Brazil in the international market is essential with regard to the quality of life of Brazilian workers, directly or indirectly. More clearly, workers depend on the prosperity of these companies to make a living and provide themselves and their respective families with better living conditions, and access to the existential minimum. Mostly, speeding up the process of robotic automation of industrial navigation brings more effectiveness in the development time of new applications that benefit society, meeting the demands of the market faster and with higher quality products, benefiting as a whole their applicability in environmental.

Our main revenue model is based on online sales and strategic alliances. For B2B2C sales in Brazil, we will use our e-commerce site and the direct sales channel: outbound sales, as in registrations raised with associations; bids in public agencies; and private initiatives, such as shopping malls, airports, hospitals, and companies that need assistive technologies that help people with disabilities to get around. Our main clients today are companies that have public and private spaces that need to provide more inclusion to the visually impaired, because they are usually places with a flow of people (clients, employees and merchants) that could move around much more comfortably more comfortably through Lysa, such as shopping malls, subways, public or private schools and private schools, colleges, hospitals, and an enormous list of possibilities, all over the world. on the other hand, we are working to be able to attend the general public, because we want to see the Lysas in the streets as a proper guide dog, so we can include Individuals in this wide list.

We practice a self-sustainable business, in which companies buy the robots for a low cost, along with the environment mapping and our support, to bring more accessibility to their customers and employees with visual impairment, generating more profits to establishments by expanding the customer base that is only possible from this technological upgrade, giving them more inclusion opportunities through increased mobility, meanwhile, we can use part of the profits from these sales, to make donations of units to the poorest visually impaired, along with all the necessary support, and maintain our employees and structure. 

We have reached some agreements with research support institutions that have allowed us to make major updates in our project and that still allow, fomentation for the team and equipment, as well as receiving some mentorship arising from awards of national and international national and international competitions, of these, we highlight some of the most important: FINEP, FAPES, FAPESP.