Development of a new robotic system for assisting and guiding visually impaired people

This paper presents a new intelligent robotic system to assist or guide visually impaired people in unknown indoor environments. The goal is to employ the robot public buildings such as hospitals, offices, etc. The robotic system, which is equipped with a visual sensor, laser range finders, speaker, gives visually impaired people information about the environment around them. The laser data are analyzed using the clustering technique, making it possible to detect obstacles, steps and stairs. In addition, the robot can be switched to the guide mode. By selecting the target location, the robot starts guiding the user toward the goal utilizing the line on the ground or evolved neural controllers. The PC analysis the sensors data and send information to the visually impaired people by natural language or beep signal. The usefulness of the proposed system is examined experimentally.