| This thesis provides a framework for context-aware navigation services to the blind people. Over the past decades, researchers have evaluated the potential of interaction with the spatial objects in a physical world for robot navigation and ubiquitous computing, whereas integrating advanced intelligence in navigation requires knowledge on the seman- tic properties of the immaterial and material objects from the user's environment. This interaction is required to enhance communication about objects and places in a human-adequate way that augments the capabilities of the user in making right decisions on travel.;Our intelligent system is a human-in-the-loop cyber-physical system, which interprets the ubiquitous semantic entities by interacting with the physical world as well as the cyber domain to enhance the users for "being aware of the presence and context in the environment". Techniques on how to interpret the location-context from the physical artifacts (viz., visual landmark, signage, text recognition, etc.) using wearable sensors (viz., camera, IMU, RGB-D) are implemented to determine the pose of the user, position of an object and its location in the environment based on the topological, landmark and metric localization technologies. Techniques on how to interpret the situational vibes from the smart artifacts (viz., tweeted events/alerts) using social sensors (viz., Twitter, Facebook) are implemented to understand the environment with event entities (viz., what, where, who, when, severity, action) based on the crowdsourced and sound localization technologies..;The evaluation of our proposed localization paradigm comprehends the usefulness of our approach in various scenarios. (viz., socialization event, natural and man-made disasters). Thus, integrating our real- time localization technologies with the fusion of wearable and social sensors to create a smart navigation system, can serve as a baseline for further investigation on this emerging topic. |
