Virtual-Blind-Road Following Based Wearable Navigation Device for Blind People

TL;DR

This paper introduces a wearable navigation device for blind people using optical see-through glasses, employing a dynamic sub-goal strategy to navigate and avoid obstacles in complex indoor environments.

Contribution

It presents a novel obstacle avoidance and route following scheme integrated into a wearable device for indoor navigation of blind users.

Findings

Effective indoor navigation demonstrated on test users.

Low-cost, compact sensors enable practical wearable deployment.

Successful obstacle bypassing in dynamic indoor scenarios.

Abstract

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.