ULTRASONIC VISION SYSTEM

Visually impaired people face major problems in activities which require visual
awareness such as: navigation, reading, sport, etc. This project attempts to contribute
to the visually impaired community as well as to academia by developing low cost,
easy to construct navigation tool which aids visually disabled to avoid objects while
navigation. The proposed method utilizes EZl ultrasonic modules, PIC18F4550
microcontroller, and 6 Volts buzzer like alarm. For user convenience and comfort, the
system is wholly implemented on an ice cap. A coherent development methodology
was adopted to implement the proposed prototype by the use of potentiometers and an
LCD during the early and mid phases of the project to emulate the ultrasonic modules
and visually debug the intermediate processing results. The practicality and
uniqueness ofthe implementation on an ice cap with the ease to wear feature shape
the significance of our contribution. Remarkably, the prototype was tested in different
scenarios and was able to detect objects up to 6.45 meters and send hearable distinct
alarms at 2 meters and 0.5 meter far. By the use of the proposed prototype, visually
impaired users can independently navigate while avoiding objects with two levels of
alarm indication. In addition, the prototype is developed to be flexible in such way
that it can be easily exploited for future extension and improvements for both
hardware and software by utilizing the abundant resources of PIC18F4550
microcontroller and CCS C compiler library.