Virtual-Blind-Road Following Based Wearable Navigation Device for Blind People
This addresses the problem of safe and efficient indoor navigation for blind people, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing navigation components with a specific enhancement.
The researchers tackled indoor navigation for blind people by developing a wearable device that guides users to destinations while avoiding obstacles using a dynamic sub-goal selection strategy, and testing showed it was effective with low-cost, compact sensors.
To help the blind people walk to the destination efficiently and safely in indoor environment, a novel wearable navigation device is presented in this paper. The locating, way-finding, route following and obstacle avoiding modules are the essential components in a navigation system, while it remains a challenging task to consider obstacle avoiding during route following, as the indoor environment is complex, changeable and possibly with dynamic objects. To address this issue, we propose a novel scheme which utilizes a dynamic sub-goal selecting strategy to guide the users to the destination and help them bypass obstacles at the same time. This scheme serves as the key component of a complete navigation system deployed on a pair of wearable optical see-through glasses for the ease of use of blind people's daily walks. The proposed navigation device has been tested on a collection of individuals and proved to be effective on indoor navigation tasks. The sensors embedded are of low cost, small volume and easy integration, making it possible for the glasses to be widely used as a wearable consumer device.