Study of the guiding means to aid blinds in their daily life

Abstract:The motion of a blind traveler in an unfamiliar environment is somewhat similar to that of a mobile robot. Both have the physical ability to perform the motion, but are dependent on a sensory system to detect obstacles in the
surroundings, and to relay the information to the control system (human brain or motion control computer) in order to avoid the obstacles. The thesis describes the design of a mobile robot obstacle avoidance system as a guiding aid for blinds and visually impaired people, to help them to navigate easily, safely and quickly among obstacles and other hazards faced by blind pedestrians in indoor/outdoor environments. To accomplish the above tasks, a system that is based on four pairs of ultrasonic sensors is designed and simulated, in order to achieve the function of position detection of the obstacles. The location information that is detected will be used to determine the direction of the system motion to be away from the obstacles to avoid collision. The simulation that used to test the system was implemented by using Multisim 9 program, for hardware simulation, and the designed software was simulated using ìVision/251 for Windows program. The results of simulation showed the fast response of the simulated system to any change in the input (represented virtually by change in obstacles environment ahead of the user), by changing in the output (represented virtually by change in system direction). The designed system offered simplicity, and it has high capability to be under development in the future to meet the needs of the blind users to move under different environments.