Design and Implementation of Embedded Based Cane Robot Using Solar Power Panel for Visually Impaired People

The paper aim is to design a smart multipurpose human assistance robotic dog that needs zero maintenance. The primary purpose of this dog is to guide the visually impaired and elderly people to some predefined destination avoiding obstacles and traffic. It is also designed to act as an advanced multipurpose human assistance and service robot that is able recognize the words spoken by the user, talk to them and take action according to the spoken voice command. Voice commands are recognized by an android smartphone and the information is transferred to the main MCU using a bluetooth serial port that runs bluetooth SPP protocol stack. The robotic dog has the ability to follow a human when commanded with voice. Touch sensitive e-skin senses human finger touch and helps answering complex user requests such as time, date and weather conditions such as light and temperature. The same can be asked using voice also. It even allows the user to set wake up alarm. A built in audio playback system can play music tracks in MP3 format. One of the music tracks is kept as the alarm tone. It also plays the role of a regular watchdog during night and barks like any normal dog if it finds any abnormal activity. During the day time it can charge itself by moving around within a given region in order to find the maximum sun light, intelligently avoiding the shaded areas, thereby freeing the user completely from maintenance issues such as battery charging. It has a head; eyes and a tail like a real dog which it uses to perform special gestures during human-robot interaction.

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