As UC Berkeley Ph.D. student Jun Zeng puts on a blindfold, he is led by a guide dog through a maze of cardboard boxes. They reach a narrow path, and the guide dog pauses, readjusts, then pulls on the leash to let Zeng know it is safe to continue. But this is no ordinary guide dog. This is a robot. In a paper published March 26, campus researchers modified a quadrupedal robot from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology into a robot guide dog. Zhongyu Li is a lead Ph.D. student on a team from the lab led by Koushil Sreenath, campus assistant professor of mechanical engineering. Li said robotic guide dogs will save a lot of time and energy that goes into training a real guide dog.