Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
The project will prove the feasibility of providing safer and more effective travel for blind individuals who live in rural communities. To that end we will:1. Determine the technologies can be used to provide geo-location information for a blind user navigating in a rural environment. While there are some "talking GPS" devices available, the mapping information provided is not adequate. Existing GPS devices know the location of streets and major structures but the mapping information usually does not include the areas and structures on a farm or ranch - i.e., house, barn, storage shed, silo, holding pen, etc.). RoboFind™ will allow mapping all of the structures of interest on a farm, ranch or rural community and then effectively communicate that information to the blind user. The user can then navigate safely.2. Determine how other technologies can be used to provide the blind with information about the local environment. In particular we are interested in locating fences, livestock, large pieces of farm equipment, gates, doors in buildings, etc. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and other forms of Automatic Identification and Data Capture (AIDC) are technologies that have potential for use in providing this additional information. RoboFind™ will detect these location and identification tags and communicate this information to the user.3. Make the necessary changes/additions in our existing Roboglasses™ product so that this product can be used to best effect in rural environments. Roboglasses™ uses haptic feedback to communicate the distance and location of objects detected using ultrasonic sensors. Fusing this information with GPS and RFID information will provide the blind user with a coherent view of the local environment. In addition, we will add audio feedback to Roboglasses™ so that some location and obstacles information can be communicated by voice to the user (e.g., south barn door is 20 feet ahead and to the right".Today, 46% of blind and visually impaired people experience head injury at least once month, sight impaired individuals are 1.5 times more likely to be obese, 81% of blind adults are unemployed and 4 million blind individuals in the U.S. over 25 years old do not have a high school diploma or GED. The Roboglasses™ and RoboFind™ devices will provide safe and more efficient travel for blind individuals of which 4.5 million live in rural communities in the United States. These individuals will be able to navigate outside the confines of their immediate environment to work, attend school, and enjoy more recreation and wellness activities.
Animal Health Component
0%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
0%
Applied
30%
Developmental
70%
Goals / Objectives
The goal of this SBIR research effort is to address the specific problems that blind rural inhabitants incur and develop a solution that will allow the blind to continue to live and work in a rural environment. To that end, we are proposing the development of a new product that will work with our Roboglasses™ product and provide navigation, object identification and other capabilities to the blind user. We term this new innovation - RoboFind™ because it can be used to help a blind wearer find his way, find a particular location or even a particular object.The primary objective of the proposed research is to determine feasibility of leveraging new technology that will enable blind users to navigate, avoid hazards and obstructions and travel safely in a rural environment. We will determine the feasibility of augmenting Roboglasses with a GPS navigation capability coupled with strategic use of RFID tags to improve the life and work efficiency of blind and sight-impaired users. The technical objective of the proposed work effort can be summarized as the development of an add-on device for use with Roboglasses™ that augments Roboglasses™ by providing direction and object identification services to the user.To meet this primary objective a number of sub-objectives must be accomplished. These include:• Determining methods of fusing information from existing Roboglasses™ sensors (ultrasonics, accelerometers, gyros, and compass) with GPS navigation and RFID tag detection information. This fused information must provide a state-space description of the user's current location and environment. The Phase I effort will develop, debug and test this fusion software.• Determining the algorithms required for producing an accurate state space description of the environment as well as safe travel and navigation instructions. We will code the required algorithms and test them in a rural environment.• Determining the algorithms needed for calculating a safe route of travel. These route-planning algorithms will utilize GPS mapping information and waypoint information entered by the user. Route planning is made more difficult in rural environments because the traveler often will not follow established roads found on traditional GPS maps. Rather travel will be shortest distance across fields, pastures, woodlots, etc.• Using only audio and haptic feedback, determine how to communicate route information to the user along with notification of departures from the planned route, features of interest encountered as identified by associated RFID tags, hazards in the travel path and other information. Our baseline design concept assumes that the user will provide commands to the system using simple capacitive touch buttons and slider input devices. These input devices will be located on the Roboglasses™ frame and stems. The Roboglasses™ and RoboFind™ systems will use a bone conduction speaker mounted in the glasses stems to convey audio information about the route, location, hazards, system status, etc. One of the major challenges of this research is developing a simple gesture-based system that will be easy to use, effective and not disruptive to the wearer. We will also use the haptic (touch feedback) devices in the Roboglasses™ to provide status and warning cues.• Determine the kind of user support services that must be provided by the proposed system. We must identify the kinds of services necessary to enable operation of the device. Support services include loading GPS data (waypoints) and map data, RFID tag programming. Tags have a unique ID associated with the tags identification (e.g., hay barn, stall) and/or location (northeast door) as well as capturing and entering audio information to be played back to the user ("Now at northeast door of dairy barn."). We must determine the exact nature of the services required and how they will be provided. This will require careful design to allow a blind user to utilize these services.
Project Methods
This project is being conducted as a product research and development effort. This includes the development of both hardware and software. To that end, the project will be initiated with a requirements definition phase that will clearly identify the functional and performance requirements of the RoboFind™ system. After the requirements are clearly defined we will continue the system development activities by developing the RFID, Bluetooth and GPS subsystems.The development effort will utilize off-the-shelf processors and I/O devices to minimize the amount of hardware that will have to be developed on Phase I. Phase I will focus on developing the software required for implementation of the system. We will use industry standard rapid software prototyping techniques.At the completion of the hardware and software component development, we will evaluate RoboFind™ using it with our Roboglasses product. The planned evaluation demonstrations will occur on a local small farm (navigating across open terrain, encountering fences, out buildings, etc. as well as livestock. A second evaluation will be conducted on the campus of Southern Arkansas University evaluating the devices in both their farm and campus environments (fences, milking barns, row crops, multiple buildings and traffic and other urban hazards)..