Experimental data files used in the manuscript "Guided accumulation of active particles by topological design of a second-order skin effect". Collective guidance of out-of-equilibrium systems without using external fields is a challenge of paramount importance in active matter, ranging from bacterial colonies to swarms of self-propelled particles. Designing strategies to guide active matter and exploiting enhanced diffusion associated to its motion will provide insights for application from sensing, drug delivery to water remediation. However, achieving directed motion without breaking detailed balance, for example by asymmetric topographical patterning, is challenging. Here we engineer a two-dimensional periodic topographical design with detailed balance in its unit cell where we observe spontaneous particle edge guidance and corner accumulation of self-propelled particles. This emergent behaviour is guaranteed by a second-order non-Hermitian skin effect, a topologically robust non-equilibrium phenomenon, that we use to dynamically break detailed balance. Our stochastic circuit model predicts, without fitting parameters, how guidance and accumulation can be controlled and enhanced by design: a device guides particles more efficiently if the topological invariant characterizing it is non-zero. Our work establishes a fruitful bridge between active and topological matter, and our design principles offer a blueprint to design devices that display spontaneous, robust and predictable guided motion and accumulation, guaranteed by out-of-equilibrium topology. ; This dataset contains a README.txt file that describes the structure of folders and the content of each file. There are two main directories : raw/ : it contains a selection of raw data files (videos, raw tracking of particles, etc.), final/ : it contains the trajectories of the tracked particles after aligning the axis and computing the cell in which the particle is located. Because of the size of the raw data files, the raw/ directory only contains one example for each setup studied in our manuscript "Guided accumulation of active particles by topological design of a second-order skin effect". The different setups correspond to either small or large samples, low or high density of active particles and topological or trivial configurations. In each of these situations we have actually performed about 10 more similar measurements, that we have analyzed to produce the data files in the final/ directory, where we show the trajectories of particles in all our measurement. Additional raw data can be requested from the authors.