Indoor Navigation System For Visually Impaired People Based On Smart Environment Explorer Stick

Nowadays, as the number of VIP(Visually Impaired People) is increasing, the tendency of more and more concerning on VIP can be observed. VIP are stil l living in the shadow before their eyes, even though various assistive technologies and devices have been developed and many research projects have been conducted to improve their life quality. Among the many troubles VIP are faced with, mobility problem is the most urgent one which are blocking them from exploring the colorful world. And considering the fact that people spend most of time indoors, the indoor mobility of VIP urgently needs to be improved, which is just the aim of this thesis, to help VIP to move in ubiquitous indoor space, such as an airport, supermarket or a hospital.In this thesis, we design and implement an indoor navigation system for VIP based on smart environment explorer stick, which is a smart stick designed for VIP navigation and integrated with multiple sensors. The indoor navigation system designs its own indoor map model to store semantic and spatial information of indoor space, and implements pathfinding function to find appropriate walking itinerary that considers both itinerary distance, obstacles and walking behavior of VIP in navigation process. It also constructs positioning & orientation module based on inertial sensors, wheel encoder, landmarks and some data fusion techniques, providing real-time, precise indoor position and orientation of VIP. Moreover, the system fulfills the obstacle detection function by utilizing the ultrasonic sensors to detect surrounding environment, remote monitoring function to ask for remote help and uses Text to Speech to provide the navigation service to VIP through voice as human machine interface. This thesis also covers testing, verifying the functions of the system.Compared to other systems, this indoor navigation system integrates some useful functions into one system and implements navigation function at a precise and reliable level with a cheap price, and the specially designed user interfaces allow easy operations of VIP.