Navigating blind people with a smart walker

Navigation in complex and unknown environments is a major challenge for blind people. The most popular, conventional navigation aids such as white canes and guide dogs, however, provide limited assistance in such settings as they are constrained to interpret the local environment only. At the same time, they can hardly be combined with a walker required by elderly people with walking disabilities. Technologies developed in the field of robotics have the potential to assist blind people in complex navigation tasks as they can provide information about obstacles and reason on both global and local environment models. The contribution of this paper is a smart walker that enables blind users to safely navigate. It includes an innovative vibro-tactile user interface and a controller that takes into account human characteristics based on a user study. The walker has been designed to deal with the fact that humans can only sense and interpret a limited number of commands and have a delayed response. Our experiments validate our claim that the technique outlined in this paper guides a user to the desired goal in less time and with shorter traveled distance compared to a standard robotic controller.