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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 didn't see this one coming.
Had to dust off the ol' "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag for this one...
Here's to the crazy ones
Will be interesting to see how they vehicle interfaces with the traffic lights system... What could possibly go wrong?
I see what you did there.
Always a good idea. You're in a taxi, and need some cash. Do you give the driver your card and the PIN and hope he doesn't rip you off? I think not.
Blind drivers? Not such a good idea. Better to let the car (or some other human) drive it.
Even the blind can see that this is a bad idea. And they don't need voice commands and vibrations to do it.
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.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
...the driver had better concentrate on the guidance system and not be distracted by any scent of a woman.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
Make it hold up to 8 people per car on a computerized rail system that could switch rails until you get to a destination. We don't have to wait for technology to catchup to get a system like this, we could build it in cities now.
God spoke to me.
....in my neighbourhood. That and/or terminally stupid. What else would you call not stopping for a red light at a busy intersection?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
So now we can all stop asking why the drive up ATM's have braille and audio out! Now that's planning ahead!
Q: What's the only thing more moronic than having braille on a drive-up ATM?
A: Manufacturing two different keypads when one does just fine and incurring the costs to do so.
In other words, having braille on all ATMs doesn't hurt anyone, even if it's an ATM that would be otherwise impractical for a visually impaired person.
Help I'm a rock.
If it works for a go-kart it could work for a motorized wheelchair. Lots of people with cerebral palsy also have sensory impairments. The sensors and software have the potential to increase the independence of a lot of people.
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
Who is at fault if you get hit be one of the auto drive cars?
Where going to sue the state, the people who made the car, the University of Maryland, Virginia Tech, the students, the people who installed this, the voice actor and any other person that let it happen.
The way I see people drive every day, I'd have thought that they have passed testing and moved onto production.
For some reason, as someone who gets around almost entirely by bicycle, this seems like an incredibly bad idea to me.
I have to say wow, a car for everybody!
SUVs have been around for years.
you can feel it from a mile away.
People cite braille on drive-up ATMs as political correctness gone crazy or the ludicrousness of government regulation, but the real reason that there is braille on drive-up ATMs is that it's not cost-effective to make two sets of ATM machines, one with braille and one without, especially since the braille has absolutely no effect on the way the machine functions. A second, braille-free model would just be for cosmetic reasons.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
The only answer is to SUE THEM ALL!
1. Rush hour downtown traffic. Account for bicycles, buses and pedestrians with utterly no regard for traffic rules. Throw in random construction zones.
2. Icy conditions anywhere. They do get snow and ice in Virginia, don't they?
I quit driving, and all I lost was my peripheral vision. There is NO WAY this can ever go anywhere but a closed course.
It is only fitting that the first blind driver vehicle is tested in the DC metro area. With the way people drive there, no one will notice.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
No rubbernecking unless your handicap is you have a neck that has the strength of rubber.
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
Do you have sources, or are you just making assumptions based on the fact it's using a laser. It seems to me with mirrors existing as part of any car on the road, they just /might/ have thought of this one.
and driving... haven't see good work like this since their soldier related Mustang commercials
http://www.fordvehicles.com/the2010mustang/?id=/
Warning, it is broken into multiple episodes but overall it is well done. It also is a great kick to see this guy and other members of the community getting to drive one of these cars.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Weren't they supposed to develop a gun for blind shooters first?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Inspired by this latest development, I'm working on with my latest project... a device that will allow intelligent ethical people to be congressmen ...
I have a degenerative eye disease, and while I can see well enough to take care of myself (and work for more than a decade as a copy editor), I have no problem saying that I don't see well enough to drive. For me, it's OK: I live in a walking-friendly city, go to a bar that's two blocks away and go to a grocery store six blocks away (as long as I don't need more than two bags of groceries at a time). And yes, I walk through ATMs that people usually drive through.
But something like this, when the kinks are worked out - I'd say a minimum of seven years from this stage to any sort of street-legal production - would allow for true independence.
Traffic lights are simple: tap into the change frequency from the lights themselves, then install a failsafe that will not allow the car to engage before the intersection is clear. Knowing bicycles are there and avoiding them is just a matter of fine-tuning the sensors to recognize smaller-than-motorcycle-sized objects (my guess is that by the time this hits the streets, it will take far more notice of bikers than most actual drivers do). I don't know how you solve the problem of pedestrians running out in front of cars, except that hopefully they'll learn after the first time.
Self-driving cars will come a whole lot sooner than flying cars, and the technology that's being developed here will probably be pivotal in their design. I'm just glad that someone has taken a functional first step in focusing this technology on people who truly need it, as opposed to those who are just don't want to drive themselves.
Very good, you managed to repeat the ending of the summary. Now you can graduate from parrot tasks to rhesus monkey tasks.
Three barks?
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
Why not use the best kind of AI--people? Stick cameras and mikes all over the outside of the car, give it a speedy 5G connection and good GPS, and have someone sitting in a car simulator in India do the driving?
.sig withheld by request
Thing about buzzes alone is they are low-density signals.
I'm going to take a frame from the recent movies and say "let's then come up with matching tech that augments the blind person! Daredevil Inc."
I think this is a Plato's Cave app. When you 'see' things, you're processing a mental map of light bouncing off objects. Okay, someone can't see in the regular sense. Find some alternate scanning system with the same order of complexity and teach the new mental map. One company experimented with audio texture sweeps. I think there's still chances for direct-neural stim to bypass a weak link in the visual system, etc.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Don't knock it until it's been shown to not work. There's probably some UI that'll make it work some day.
The first thing that comes to mind is a modified laser range finder (that can move the laser in two dimensions instead of one) and convert it into an overhead map of obstacles, reflectors, etc. Then, convert it to a tactile graphic on the fly. Assuming the resolution of touch can be overcome (it's fairly bad), with enough training, a blind driver might be able to constantly feel a map of their surroundings and control the car accordingly.
Or, a pair of cameras could produce a 3D tactile graphic (either by raising the bumps at various heights, or showing two graphics and train the brain to merge them as a 3D image) or audio.
I think this is great. Now, I hope they create something women will be able to drive.
Why not just automate all cars? Then it wouldn't matter if you were blind or not. We have the means to do it, and the resources, just maybe not the MONEY ...
Time driving would be cut in half, and while you were in transit you could spend your time doing other things besides cussing out someone cutting you off or that blind person driving
*DrugCheese rants*
I think of this as just being an intermediate step to self-driving cars.
A slightly different application of this would be to have the guidance system sending the data to a remote sighted operator, who was then driving the vehicle.
Think of it as TTY, but with cars instead. :-)
If you can make a computer that is good enough to tell a blind person what to do to drive safely in an environment with other cars, pedestrians, unexpected potholes, etc., why not cut the person out of the control loop altogether and just connect that computer directly to the drive system and make a self-driving car for everybody?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
the braille on drive-thru ATMs!
well, I was walking alongside the road, and this vehicle was coming towards me, then there was this bright flash and now I can't see anymore.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
...but your average sighted driver is dangerous enough. I know, I pass thousands of them every day. They're all crazy, every one of them.
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.
As part of our degrees, myself and my housemate worked on an audio based augmented reality system. We had a bunch of sensors to track position (we used ubisense at the time, it now uses gps or something), orientation (digital compass, gyroscope, accelerometer) and distance from solid objects (ultrasonic) to track the wearers movements and then provided 3D audio feedback through a pair of high quality wireless headphones.
Applications for this were both entertainment and guidance (though you could come up with more elaborate applications if you try hard enough, we didn't since time was limited). For entertainment, we had a few ideas: a virtual zoo (or anything else that can be represented through sound) where you can walk around and hear different animals and, more interesting, a virtual band where each instrument is playing at a different location in the room and the wearer can walk around the soundscape.
For guidance, we built two simple applications: we position a row of sounds to guide the wearer to some location. Only the next "waypoint" is audible and when you walk "into" it, it stops playing and the next one in the sequence starts. The other one was that a sound would play when it detected a wall (and the sound changed so you could effectively "scan" along a wall and get a rough idea as to its shape). Got some great feedback off a blind guy too.
My housemate is loosely continuing this project as part of his phd. The sensors, for example, have been replaced by "military" grade ones, so the accuracy is phenomenally good now. Also, the whole thing is packaged better (and smaller) than our tape-and-wires prototype was. Its interesting to "see" what else people can use audio for, it seems to still be relatively untapped as an output device for computers/augmented reality.
I hope they implement something to keep sounds from outside from drowning out the voice part...
Hell they first have to develop something to keep the backseat driver/wife/mom from talking to the driver...
Did you see that car dear?
NO I'M BLIND!
This is another step on the way to the 'I, Robot'-style autopilot. Good.
No wonder Americans are so fat!
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Or a winding mountain road.
Theyre called taxis...
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
I think the technical problems of a self driving car will be solved long before the legal ones are.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I thought we already had these, clustered in training centers around the nation.
Called 'bumper cars.'
may be closer than they feel.
It would be fantastic if all cars could just drive themselves.
Hope is the currency of fools
Do you have sources, or are you just making assumptions based on the fact it's using a laser. It seems to me with mirrors existing as part of any car on the road, they just /might/ have thought of this one.
Of course they did. It's part of the nefarious plot to make people blind so they can sell more cars.
Had to brush up my Logical Fallacy book for this.
I'm pretty sure Braille punched keys cost more than Normal Keys. And this punching is probably a step in the key-making machine that can be toggled off. So when you're making millions of keys, you can easily SAVE by not punching some cards, rather than incurring costs.
http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.
Don't worry! We have recently invented a vehicle that allows you to drive without sight!
Mirror? What if they are in the south? All the chrome bumpers on all the trucks!!!
How much would a setup like this cost? I mean, I can't imagine it's cheaper than hiring a chauffeur, and they're a lot less likely to go BSOD on you while you're doing 70mph down the freeway...
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.
Even better: crowd sourcing. I would love to "help". Of course, they would need to require an e-mail address to register. Wouldn't want any jokers mowing down a stream of pedestrians and then stopping the car in a Dairy Queen.
What! It's not for drivers but for pedestrians. Gee Golly Beaver, am I glad you pointed that out for me and the rest of people on Slashdot.org.
To err is to be human, to really screw up takes a computer and a human.
Holy hell, just let the blind dude drive!!!*
*making fun of how people drive in India, not being racist.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
One of my professors in college worked on a government project to design an automated highway system where cars would drive themselves. They had everything figured out and it was completely feasible to put in place. Then the entire project got scrapped because the lawyers couldn't figure out the liability issue.
I'd find it highly unlikely that a system would rely on ONE SINGLE laser. Not only do you have a point about mirrors, but what about if you're heading straight for a telephone pole? If you have only one laser and it's not actually pointed at that pole, it'll just give an all clear...
So unless they're stupid, there's more than one laser and error-correction between them.
How much will car insurance cost for a blind driver? Will any company even cover them? Or will they just make all seeing drivers pay extra for Unseeing Motorist coverage?
At last, referees and umpires will be able to drive themselves to work!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
They will make it illegal to wield a mirror any where near the white and red striped vehicles.
Why bother
All the street signs can be encoded in braille in the reflective dots between the lanes. They can just open the door and run their fingers on the ground while they drive.
Maybe it will help them to stay in their lane too.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Maybe it will help them to stay in their lane too.
Sighted people can't stay in their lanes. It can only get better.
I don't want to be the sighted driver on the road during the beta test of this system.
I'd rather see the development of robots who can do the driving for the driving-impaired as a proper solution.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Identifying one-way streets, wrong-way signs, and street names in general. Road construction. Sink holes. Merging onto highways. Two-way streets with no center divider. Snowy weather. Just to name a few.
Ask a veteran what they think about government health care.
Loved it. No joke.
Every time I run this through my head the word "No" reflexively comes off my lips