Voice Operated Outdoor Navigation System for Visually Impaired Persons

Blind People uses white canes to aid in obstacle detection & avoidance. Guide dogs can also be of limited aid for finding the way to a remote location. So our goal is to create a portable, simple less costly system that will allow Blind peoples to travel through familiar and unfamiliar environments without the aid of guides. Several guidance system has been developed for vision impaired people, but these systems tends to be expensive, also make use of a client server approach. This Navigation system consists of two distinct components: sensing of the immediate environment for blind people to travel (e.g., obstacles and hazards) and navigating to remote destinations beyond the immediately perceptible environment. The paper described here focused on the development and evaluation of a Navigation system that makes use of GPS (the Global Positioning System), voice and ultrasonic sensor for obstacle detection. KeywordsGPS, Blind, Navigation, ARM Processor, Impaired Vision, NMEA Protocol.