Throw off the blind cane Smart glasses allow the blind to _see_ the world There are currently about 14 million blind peo

Throw off the blind cane Smart glasses allow the blind to "see" the world There are currently about 14 million blind people in China, and it is the travel status of the vast majority of blind people to rely on a blind cane to carefully detect and grope forward. Only the more affluent blind people may have a docile and intelligent guide dog. According to incomplete statistics, the cost of about 200,000 yuan of guide dogs, the supply of serious shortage of only about 90 in the country.

Due to the limited means of perceiving the outside world, blind people often fall and even get injured when they encounter obstacles. Nowadays, the invention of guide glasses has played no small role. FB0031 Unisex Glasses Frame C01 Glossy Black Doogo team at GIX College of Tsinghua University has developed an electronic guide dog Doogo inspired by guide dogs.

Doogo is actually a three- or four-kilogram robot that looks like a robot vacuum cleaner with a long handle, and blind people only need to hold the tow bar and follow its path when they go out. This is possible because the Doogo is equipped with both a lidar and a depth camera on the front of the fuselage. With a detection range of 25-30 meters and an accuracy of 3 centimeters, LiDAR can accurately detect the surrounding environment and perceive obstacles, and then realize real-time navigation and obstacle avoidance through built-in algorithms.

Doogo currently does not use a power-hungry foot design, which means that this electronic guide dog cannot climb the stairs for the time being, and users can only carry this electronic guide dog when going up and down the stairs. In contrast, guide glasses are much lighter.

Imagine such a scene: close your eyes, put on glasses and headphones, and the electronic female voice "go straight, go straight, go straight, turn right...... this visual aid glasses for the blind developed by Krypton Technology is expected to become a smart and reliable travel assistant for the blind.

"It has three cameras that take 20 to 30 pictures per second, process the data, and tell the wearer by sound if there is an obstacle ahead." Yu Honglei of the Krypton team said that blind people can perceive three-dimensional information through sound prompts, including the size, location, and direction of the obstacles next to them, so as to judge how to walk safely.

Transforming visual images into concise sound prompts, the "Angel Eye" blind glasses developed by Shanghai PostVONE Electronics are also taking this road. The "Angel Eye" equipped with the vision module is connected to the mobile phone through a data cable, just like 40 virtual blind sticks scanning in a centralized manner, automatically calculating the spatial distribution of obstacles and identifying objects, and then converting the results into audio signals to broadcast to the blind people wearing the "Angel Eyes".

As a result of continuous improvements, the weight of the glasses has now been reduced to 40 grams. Feng Xinpeng, CEO of NextVCU, said that the depth image collected by the camera is displayed in red and green states on the mobile phone, with green representing the ground that can be walked, red representing obstacles, and piano tones as prompts. If you approach an obstacle, it will give an alarm like a reversing radar, and the originally gentle sound will become abrupt.

Boots POF13502 Unisex Glasses frame BK Black According to the travel and daily life needs of the blind, the "Angel Eye" can currently recognize traffic lights, zebra crossings, stairs, doors, passages, etc., and can also recognize words, faces, banknotes, etc. in daily life, and then carry out voice broadcast, and the whole process of taking pictures does not need to be focused.

Computer vision technology is used to help the visually impaired, and some companies in the United States, Israel, the United Kingdom, and other countries are also making similar products. Facebook has previously launched a picture reading function, and when a blind person reads the news, it will output pictures and text to the speech engine, and tell the blind person what is in the picture in the form of a voice description. There is also the famous Wicab, a blind assistant that uses a camera to capture images of the surroundings and reconstruct the images in the blind brains through electrodes placed on the tongue, so that the blind can "see" again.

Unfortunately, the prices of these foreign products are generally high at present. Wicab, for example, has a market price of around $10,000, making it difficult to get widespread. The electronic guide dogs and smart glasses developed by the above-mentioned domestic team are much cheaper.

For example, Doogo now costs about 5,000 yuan, and the team leader said that with more and more companies making low-cost lidar, it is expected to reduce the price of products to 3,000-4,000 yuan through small batch mass production in the future. Seekr also wants the product to be priced around 3,500 yuan.

The price of the "Angel Eye" product is about 750 US dollars, and it is currently in small batch internal testing and is expected to be launched this year. This article is from Beijing Daily, slightly modified,