Indoor Navigation System for Visually Challenged Using Ultrasonic Sensor Map with Vibrational Feedback

: Navigation in indoor environments is highly challenging for visually impaired persons. Conventionally, they use white cane or guide dog for traveling to desired destination. Several solutions have been proposed to deal with this challenge. Although, some of them have shown to be useful in real scenarios, they involve an important deployment effort or use artifacts that are not natural for blind users. This paper presents an indoor navigation system that was designed taking into consideration of usability and system cost. In this scenario; which is typically called GPS denied environment, the GPS signal is very poor because of the lack of line of sight between satellites and the receiver. Ultrasonic sensors are very useful for navigation because they have the advantage that the system is simple and are easy to handle. This solution uses prebuilt ultrasonic based map to travel from source to destination. Using this map, the system determines the user’s trajectory, locates possible obstacles in that route, and offers haptic navigation information to the user. System is implemented with beagle bone black microcontroller with 3 ultrasonic sensors and three vibrators. This prototype can further be evolved as a device that can be attached to a waist belt.