An obstacle avoidance system

• Main Author: Tee, Zhi Heng
• Other Authors: Lee Peng Hin
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/77484
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Since the implementation of assistive technology in the 1960s, mobility assistance becomes more and more important for the Visually Impaired to recognize their surroundings. Aids such as white cane, guide dogs and sighted guide to help the Visually Impaired to overcome these problems for outdoor navigation purposes. Positioning systems like the Global Positioning System (GPS) operated well for outdoor navigations. However, technology like this are too expensive and perform moderately only due to line of sight obstruction during indoor navigation. Therefore, several technologies have been put together to aid the independent walking of the Visually Impaired inside a building and one such technology is the use of ultrasonic sensors. It is being used together with hand held personal devices like smart phones and tablets to inform the Visually Impaired when navigating indoors. Nowadays indoor navigation systems evolve rapidly to become more user friendly and give more accurate results. Thus, this project aims to build an Arduino based obstacle avoidance system for the Visually Impaired to navigate around freely. The system consists of an Arduino system (Ultrasonic sensors, Bluetooth module and software program) and an electronic device (software program) for user input. It is designed to be simple to use and inexpensive as well so that there would not be additional installation cost. At the end of the project, a prototype is built based on the design and did experiments for testing purposes. During experiments, problems such as Bluetooth baud rate, declaring of global variable have been identified. Fortunately, the above-mentioned problems were fixed with suitable solutions. This project is made effective so that it would benefit the Visually Impaired during indoor navigation system.