In order to help the blind and the visual impaired people to travel outdoor safely, a guide cane system is designed in this paper. It comprises the thin cane as well as the rich remote workstation. When travelling in outdoor environments, the blind could easily set a destination via the voice recognition interface. Meanwhile, the goal and current locations are transmitted to the remote center in real time by using GPS and GPRS modules. After planning a navigation path globally, the route information is downloaded to the guide cane. All guiding information can be expressed to the blind in both auditory and tactile modes. In addition, an RGB-D camera is used to capture dynamic visual environmental information which is uploaded to the remote center for further processing, while ultrasonic sensors are employed to help avoid obstacles around. Testing results show that the system is simple to operation, and has a good usability and reliability.
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