Project Group 22: Vision Assistive Wearables

Vision Assistive Wearables

Axion Electronics (Project Group 22)

Mentor: Professor Kwei-Jay Lin

Introduction

We have created a chest piece mounted on a vest that will notify the wearer of incoming obstacles. These notifications will come in forms of vibrations that will vary in strength and pulse that will scale with the detected object's distance from the user. The active vibration motors will be aligned in the direction of the obstacle detected by the sensors. This functioning prototype was designed to be used to help detect objects and obstacles in dark environments.

Approach

Chestpiece will work to provide warnings about obstacles to the user in the form of vibrations. It will contain Arduino Due as the central processing unit and will take input from sonar/ultrasonic sensors mounted at various points on the vest. If there is object detection from any of the sensors then it will issue vibrations to the vibration nodes that are closest to the direction the threat is in. Vibration nodes will be arranged in columns on the front side of the vest to indicate which direction the object is coming from. Sensors are able to detect flat and wide surfaces reliably but struggle to detect smaller rounded objects.

Project Status

We immediately began ordering parts and testing and verifying the functionality of the sensors at the beginning of the quarter (delayed by UROP funding). As parts continued to arrive, we began integrating the sensors into an array as shown on the right, and designed a MOSFET switching circuit to control the array of vibration motors using the Arduino Due digital out pins. We arranged the motor array as shown on the right, and began combining the separate parts into the complete prototype.

Contact members:

Kyle Lam (kylehl1@uci.edu)

Kent Pluntze (kpluntze@uci.edu)

John Efseaff (jefseaff@uci.edu)

Elliot Rhee (ejrhee@uci.edu)