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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?
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...
....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.
For some reason, as someone who gets around almost entirely by bicycle, this seems like an incredibly bad idea to me.
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
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.
Weren't they supposed to develop a gun for blind shooters first?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I think this is great. Now, I hope they create something women will be able to drive.
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.
Theyre called taxis...
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
may be closer than they feel.
Don't worry! We have recently invented a vehicle that allows you to drive without sight!
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.
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.