SRAVIP: Smart Robot Assistant for Visually Impaired Persons

Abstract

Vision is one of the most important human senses, as visually impaired people encounter various difficulties due to their inability to move safely in different environments. This research aimed to facilitate integrating such persons into society by proposing a robotic solution (Robot Assistance) to assist them in navigating within indoor environments, such as schools, universities, hospitals, airports, etc. according to a prescheduled task. The proposed system is called the smart robot assistant for visually impaired persons (SRAVIP). It includes two subsystems: 1) an initialization system aimed to initialize the robot, create an environment map, and register a visual impaired person as a target object; 2) a real-time operation system implemented to navigate the mobile robot and communicate with the target object using a speech-processing engine and an optical character recognition (OCR) module. An important contribution of the proposed SRAVIP is the user-independent, i.e. it does not depend on the user, and one robot can serve unlimited users. SRAVIP utilized Turtlebot3 robot to realize SRAVIP and then tested it in the College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, AlMuzahmiyah Campus. The experimental results confirmed that the proposed system could function successfully.