A Touch of Light

A step towards enlightenment for those living in the world of darkness.

A Young India Fellowship Initiative in collaboration with University of Pennsylvania


      





Saturday, November 26, 2011

Getting ready to release the 1st version




Huhuuu! After facing lots of troubles at every step, we were finally able to get the project working by seamlessly integrating all the components. The video above shows as to how Kinect is able to detect an object (human in our case) and give an alarm depending on the distance between the human and Kinect. In our case, we have used three vibration motors for producing these alert signals. Each motor is used to send an alert for obstacle in one particular direction namely, left, right or middle. These three motors would help a visually impaired person in identifying the direction in which the obstacle is present. We hope to transfer this functionality on the belt in a day or two.This would mark the end of first phase of our project where we were supposed to make a working prototype of the viSparsh Belt.

2 comments:

  1. Why would you use kinect and linux and pandaboard, just to get distance from an obstacle ?
    Why dont you use multiple infrared trans receiver of different ranges and a small micro controller to control the vibrator motors ?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dear Abhishek,

    If I am not wrong you are referring to the way
    we design a wall follower or obstacle detector
    vehicle. Right?

    It is possible to make such a device with the
    method you propose but there are some technical
    and strategic issues behind our decision not
    to choose them. IR pair doesn't work well in
    daylight and even if you go for modulated waves
    the performance is not as good as we need as a
    blind man is going to completely rely on the
    device. Think how Infrared light from sun and tv
    remotes can affect the performance. Also the
    time response characteristics of unmodulated
    IR are erratic.

    Secondly, we are not developing it just as a
    project but looking to make it a robust
    multifunctional device. What you see here is
    just the phase-1 [Initial Testing Phase]. The
    real experimental phase is yet to come. The final
    version would be a much compact and lighter with
    face recognition, GPS tracking and other such
    threads working in parallel. We need high computing power for that.

    Thanks a lot for your valuable comment. It shows
    your interest in the work and gives us invaluable feedback. We look forward to hear back from you in future.

    Stay tuned :)

    Team viSparsh

    ReplyDelete

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Getting ready to release the 1st version




Huhuuu! After facing lots of troubles at every step, we were finally able to get the project working by seamlessly integrating all the components. The video above shows as to how Kinect is able to detect an object (human in our case) and give an alarm depending on the distance between the human and Kinect. In our case, we have used three vibration motors for producing these alert signals. Each motor is used to send an alert for obstacle in one particular direction namely, left, right or middle. These three motors would help a visually impaired person in identifying the direction in which the obstacle is present. We hope to transfer this functionality on the belt in a day or two.This would mark the end of first phase of our project where we were supposed to make a working prototype of the viSparsh Belt.

2 comments:

  1. Why would you use kinect and linux and pandaboard, just to get distance from an obstacle ?
    Why dont you use multiple infrared trans receiver of different ranges and a small micro controller to control the vibrator motors ?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dear Abhishek,

    If I am not wrong you are referring to the way
    we design a wall follower or obstacle detector
    vehicle. Right?

    It is possible to make such a device with the
    method you propose but there are some technical
    and strategic issues behind our decision not
    to choose them. IR pair doesn't work well in
    daylight and even if you go for modulated waves
    the performance is not as good as we need as a
    blind man is going to completely rely on the
    device. Think how Infrared light from sun and tv
    remotes can affect the performance. Also the
    time response characteristics of unmodulated
    IR are erratic.

    Secondly, we are not developing it just as a
    project but looking to make it a robust
    multifunctional device. What you see here is
    just the phase-1 [Initial Testing Phase]. The
    real experimental phase is yet to come. The final
    version would be a much compact and lighter with
    face recognition, GPS tracking and other such
    threads working in parallel. We need high computing power for that.

    Thanks a lot for your valuable comment. It shows
    your interest in the work and gives us invaluable feedback. We look forward to hear back from you in future.

    Stay tuned :)

    Team viSparsh

    ReplyDelete