The Design Of An Electronic Blind Crutch With The Function Of Positioning Navigation And Obstacle Avoidance

Now with the increasing development of urban traffic, the travel problems of the blind and visually impaired people face enormous challenges. The traditional blind crutch is far from meeting the needs of their safety walk. Therefore, wide variety of modern seeing-eye equipment has gradually entered into the life of the blind, aiming to improve their walking ability and life quality. But for now both traditional blind crutch and all kinds of guide device have their limitations, which have yet to be on the actual needs of the blind to provide comprehensive and personalized service. So it is quite urgent and necessary to design an intelligent electronic blind crutch of positioning navigation and obstacle avoidance functions, which can effectively assist the blind for secure walking.The design of the crutch is mainly based on ARM11-Windows CE6.0embedded development platform, supplemented by GPS receiving module and the ultrasonic transceiver module, which can realize real-time GPS positioning, electronic map query, track record, real-time navigation and ultrasonic obstacles detection, etc. The real-time navigation function can be divided into map navigation and track corner-point navigation, which is convenient for users to switch at any time according to different situations. The track corner-point navigation mode is proposed on the basis of track corner-point extraction algorithm, which is also the main innovation point in this paper. The obstacle avoidance function proposed in this article is to use ultrasonic distance measurement to detect the position of the obstacles and warn the user for avoiding obstacles. During actual walking, the blind and visually impaired people can reach the preset destination safely and conveniently by opening the corresponding functions of the blind crutch, improving their quality of the outdoor walking effectively.For the specific characteristics of blind and visually impaired people, and the hardware condition of the embedded device, this design mainly adopts voice broadcast and several simple keys for man-machine interaction. The blind or visually impaired people can choose various functions through different keys. The system afterwards will enter into the specific function and give out rich voice messages according to user’s choice. When the blind crutch detects obstacle ahead, the voice output module will sound an alarm, prompting the user to give way.The software design part for the electronic crutch has been completed. The hardware part adopts the ARM11development board, GPS receiving module and ultrasonic transceiver module. In field tests, both the positioning navigation and obstacle avoidance function of the blind crutch run independently and stably. By Through theoretical analysis and experimental verification, the blind crutch can not only effectively guide the user to the specified destination, but also provide a more comprehensive assurance to cope with complex environment, with strong practicability and realistic meaning.