AI Based Pilot System for Visually Impaired People

In today's world we live with visually impaired people struggling to do things at their full potential as they lack sight of the environment they live in. Affected individuals are often seen with slips, trips and fall over light obstacles on their walkway. To some extent, these blind people cannot relate to any objects they come across such as cars and people around. As technology evolves, there has been numerous attempts in solving this problems for the affected group of people and the proposed solutions need further improvement on how to effectively assist the affected individuals to navigate from one place to the other using real-time updates of their whereabouts. This paper presents the design of an intelligent walking stick for the blind using Raspberry Pi 3 b+ as a central microcontroller, Ultrasonic sensors and Global Positioning System (GPS). The ultrasonic sensors are used for scanning the environment on walkway and sideways using sound waves at certain defined distances, and GPS module is used for real time directions and navigation. It also contains Bluetooth-headset that is used for the audio navigation through the aid of interpretation from the real time feed of ultrasonic sensors and coordinates from the GPS, thereby giving the user the actual route and possible turns until the destination point. Special emergency messages using keywords of the location coordinates obtained through GPS are sent via SMS subscription account connected to the GPIO pins of the Raspberry Pi to care-givers for tracking purposes when required. The entire setup of the intelligent walking stick makes navigation and tracking possible, thus effectively assisting the visually impaired people.