An Indoor Obstacle Detector to Assist the Visually Impaired Person on Real-Time with a Navigator

Abstract

In 2014, the World Health Organization estimated that 285 million people were visually impaired in the world, 39 million are blind and 246 million have low vision. With the development of technologies, various techniques evolved for assisting the visually impaired people. These people need to have such supportive system which will make the things much easier and they don’t have to rely on others every now and then. For which various devices has already been invented. But most of them are GPS based which unfortunately prevent them to be effectively and efficiently used in the indoor environment. Our motive is to bring up an idea which can help these people in the indoor environment and make their life much simpler. In our project both the obstacle detection and navigation together are done using the Raspberry Pi 3 camera, the PIR sensor, ultrasonic sensors, so that the obstacles can be detected in real time. For the navigation purpose the ultrasonic sensor has been used and the output is provided by speakers and the vibrator motors and buzzer. For the testing of the system, obstacles are placed in front of the system and it was able to detect the obstacles successfully and without any errors. The Camera was able to detect the predefined objects successfully. The speaker and buzzer motors were able to warn the user about the obstacles. The device includes two vibrator motors that are placed in both the hands that will be navigating the user which way the obstacle is there and which way the user has to move. The vibrators were successfully able to navigate the user.