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Prototype Vehicle For the Blind
An anonymous reader writes "A student team from Virginia Tech Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory have created a vehicle which allows the blind to drive. The vehicle uses a laser range finder to determine distances and alerts the driver through voice commands and vibration. Tomorrow [Friday] morning, the vehicle will have its first public test drive at the University of Maryland. At last, Braille on drive-up ATMs may finally be vindicated."
I hope they never allow these things on public roads with blind drivers. Handicapped accesibility is good and all but we shouldn't risk handicapping more people for it. Seriously, the driving is dangerous enough with a bunch of idiots who can see just fine.
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It has nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with the way this country is structured. With a few exceptions (New York City, San Francisco and a couple of other cities), the U.S. is very spread out, even in urban areas. It can be several miles to the nearest bank and that can be in the opposite direction of the supermarket. There are also places like certain shopping malls which are nearly impossible to access on foot. Our public transportation systems are woefully inadequate as well, making a car pretty essential for most people in the United States. On top of all of this, some bank branches don't have any ATMs other than the drive-up window.
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Think how talking on a cellphone would end
For some reason, as someone who gets around almost entirely by bicycle, this seems like an incredibly bad idea to me.
Beyond that, there is always the possibility of a car rolling up with a blind passenger in the BACK, who may wish to operate the ATM unassisted. It must be bad enough never getting to drive... though that seems to be another barrier falling.
I have heard that Ray Charles liked to ride a motorcycle by following someone else and just listening to where they went and what noises their bike was making. (Needless to say, this requires a cooperative lead rider.) Then Mythbusters did the "blind drunk" driving test and found that a blind person can follow directions and drive passably. Maybe this is not so far-fetched. Still, if we can make a machine smart enough to instruct a person how to drive, why can't we just let the machine drive?
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I think that'd be the easy part. A camera with Image processing for lane alignment and the same image every time. The lane alignment was actually my senior thesis--in 1993. It was just software, and I only tested it with one test set, so I have no idea how reliable it would have been. It was nowhere near real time either. I had no access to digital video. I had to rely on one test set, and I have no idea how they got the digitized frames. I imagine the reliability of the image processing has advanced; but I know the cost of digital capture devices has certainly come way down.
At present, I tend to share the "what could possibly go wrong" sentiment; but at some point in the future we may find automated systems to be more reliable than humans. Before we put it on cars though, we should get it working on trains. In theory, that's an easier problem; but we still have problems with automated trains.
I don't have data to back it up; but it seems like more train accidents are happening in manual mode now. In particular, an Amtrak accident last year (operator texting) and a recent San Francisco muni crash (operator had put train in manual). The last time I recall hearing about a train accident in automatic was on DC's metro system. It was during a snowstorm. IIRC, The operator was attempting to put the train in manual, but the system wouldn't allow it.. It was out of service, and the operator was the only fatality. That was in 1996 though.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I really do not understand the point. If one can make a feedback system capable of effectively and intelligently guiding a blind person it wouldn't be necessary... Just make the car capable of driving itself. A sighted person has a hard enough time interpreting and reacting to evolving situations around them. Responding to vibrations and voice alerts is most certainly slower.
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We're really good at filtering and rapidly processing large amounts of visual information. Can six lanes of rush hour traffic on icy roads be communicated through a combination of sound and touch? I'd guess not, but I may be wrong.
Ok, I'm blind. I use that term in the sense the NFB uses it (or at least did last time I heard) - non-correctable vision impairment that affects day-to-day life. It is also correct to say I'm legally blind, though not totally blind.
And, I live in a part of the U.S. where inability to drive is a serious hinderance. (That doesn't narrow things down much.)
But I have to say, I think this idea is... well... misguided. I agree with the end goal (better independent mobility for the blind), but the approach is all wrong. It may be that TFA isn't giving a full sense of how this works, and certainly even what they've described is an amazing technological acheivement; but the real problems of a blind driver are orders of magnitude more complex.
Dealing with lane alginment, spotting intersections, parking challenges... those could be handled with an infrastructure investment to make "smart roads" that can talk to the car.
How will the laser range-finder fair with bicycles? Kids running across the road? A wheel, matress, or other random piece of junk that fell off another vehicle? The unexpected?
What happens when all of this active sensing equipment fails for some reason?
By the time you invest enough to solve all of these problems, you could have the car drive itself. I don't see this as a useful "intermediate step" in that direction, as someone else suggested, because the human interface is a more complex challenge than the automated intelligence it replaces - which is why there have already been robots that can drive on a closed track.
In truth, I think it's a sloppy American attitude to think that autonomous living is predicated on driving your own car. The fact that most Americans don't use public trnasportation, along with the resulting low quality of American public transportation (on average), makes the idea of a blind person using public transportation stand out in America as a disparity.
In other words, I don't think we should try to shoehorn blind drivers into the American transportation infrastructure; I think we should build an infrastructure that supports everyone.