The Assistive Walker for Visually Impaired Using Hand Haptic

The purpose of this research is to develop the sight assistive walker using hand haptic. The feature of the system is user centered system. The main important tasks while walking such as environmental recognition, path planning and locomotion are made by the user. This system is not involved in such important tasks. It provides the users only the environmental information through hand haptic in order to create user's mental map. The system configurations are as follows. This system is something like a cane, and it has a small passive mobile platform on its tip. The LRF (Laser Range Finder) is used for environmental sensing. The powder brakes are used for generating passive brake forces. In order to let the mobile platform move both lateral and back-forward, the four omni-directional wheels are adopted. By generating brake force based on the distance to the obstacles in the moving direction, user can recognize the environment through the hand haptic information. The experimental result showed that the proposed system can assist the walking and creating mental map by presenting environmental information through the hand haptic. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.