ARGUS Autonomous Navigation System for People with Visual Impairments

This work addresses the challenge of designing an effective, reliable and affordable autonomous navigation system for blind and visually impaired people which also covers journey planning and post journey activities (such as recommendations and experiences sharing) . The main contribution focuses on the integration of accurate real-time user positioning data with binaural 3D audio based guiding techniques on mobile devices and a web services delivering platform. The aim is to produce an autonomous navigation system that can be used to guide targeted users along pre-defined tracks and that can be used also before and after the journey to carry out several related tasks such as journey planning, training and sharing of experiences. A preliminary prototype of this concept has been built and tested with 4 end users in both rural and urban environments, obtaining encouraging results.