Indoor Path Planning Research For Seeing Eyes Robot Base On RFID

The number of visually impaired people in recent years is becoming larger and larger,while with the rapid development of robot technology, developing a suitable seeing eyesrobot to assist the blind in their daily lives is one of the best choices. The main task of theseeing eyes robot is using a variety of sensors to perceive the environment, then combinedwith the acquisition of environmental information to guide the visually impaired action，and finally lead the blind to reach their destinations safely by avoiding obstacles correctlyin environment.This paper presents a new design scheme for the seeing eyes robot based on the keytechnologies of the current seeing eyes robots, meanwhile according to design program toselect the appropriate control module, and to structure the seeing eyes robot experimentplatform. This seeing eyes robot equipped with ultrasonic sensors, voice module, RFIDmodule and so on, besides the basic functions of obstacle avoidance and the handle control,it also can achieve the object recognition, voice warning function etc, further enhance thehuman-computer interaction in general also. The seeing eyes robot in this paper is mainlyused in the indoor environment. Through analysis and comparison of indoor positioningtechnology, finally adopt RFID technology as the positioning technology and carry on adetailed description and analysis to it. During the position in the indoor environment, thispaper use the UHF RFID reader placed on the robot to read the UHF electronic tagsarranged in the environment, then convert signal strength value into a distance value tofinish the positioning process. Because of signal strength strongly affected by theenvironment, so this paper takes the intermediate value strategy to acquire the signalstrength value, it can reduce the positioning error. At the same time, this paper places thelow-frequency tags as a signpost at the entrance of environment, which can calibrate thecoordinate of seeing eyes robot in the environment while the robot be in motion, also canreduce the impact of the positioning error of the UHF RFID.The seeing eyes robot is mainly designed for the blind or visually injured, so the pathplanning function is especially important to the seeing eyes robot. Considering thecomplexity of indoor environment, this paper takes the advantage of the data acquisition ofthe RFID module to build the environment model base on the visibility graph. Based on theprimary research, integrate into the A*algorithm and put forward a new path planning algorithm. Through using the heuristic search pattern can greatly reduce greatly the numberof the prime nodes need to search and improve search efficiency. At the same time thispaper put forward a judgment method of the visibility points, when the starting point anddestination point changed, the robot can directly search for a feasible path withoutrebuilding the visibility graph, which greatly improves the flexibility and real-timecompared to the traditional visibility graph. Finally, via experiments on seeing eyes robotdesigned verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the above methods.