Development of a Positioning Tool for the Navigation of Visually Impaired People

Petra Hafner, Katrin Huber, Thomas Moder, Manfred Wieser, Gernot Hollinger, Clemens Strauß

Peer Reviewed

Abstract:	According to the Federal Ministry of Labor, Social Affairs, and Consumer Protection, approximately 3.9% of the Austrian population suffers from permanent visual impairments. Although this quantity is respectable, this group of the society still experiences problems, others do not even think of. One example is the daily navigation through the urban environment, where traffic junctions and busy roads involve many risks and dangers, if one of the sensory organs is impaired. Therefore, especially blind people lack accurate and reliable navigation systems to facilitate their daily routes and increase their safety. Current pedestrian navigation systems are usually based on smartphones/mobile devices with position accuracies of 1 m or worse. These systems cannot warn of obstacles like mailboxes, road signs, etc. reliably, since for this a sub-meter accuracy is needed. Further, Kalman Filters are used which cannot profit optimally from navigable maps. It would be desirable, if the geometric information of obstacles could be used not only for routing but also to enhance and support the position solution. Therefore, an accurate and reliable positioning tool being part of a pedestrian navigation system for visually impaired people is developed and described within this paper. This innovative positioning component is based on a particle filter approach integrating GNSS single-frequency precise point positioning (PPP) and pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) data in combination with a user-tailored navigable map. This user-tailored navigable map contains specific information for visually impaired persons, which constrains the pathways according to their probability within the filter. Combining all these components (PPP, PDR, user-tailored navigable map) within a particle filter enables a positioning within a decimeter level. This paper presents the design and development of a positioning tool specially tailored for the navigation support of visually impaired people. The system components are illustrated, comprising the composition of a user-tailored navigable map and methods like PPP, PDR, and particle filter. Finally, first results including the performance compared to SPP-based (SPP - single point positioning) positioning and a common particle filter approach are shown.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 27th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2014) September 8 - 12, 2014 Tampa Convention Center Tampa, Florida
Pages:	1867 - 1878
Cite this article:	Hafner, Petra, Huber, Katrin, Moder, Thomas, Wieser, Manfred, Hollinger, Gernot, Strauß, Clemens, "Development of a Positioning Tool for the Navigation of Visually Impaired People," Proceedings of the 27th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2014), Tampa, Florida, September 2014, pp. 1867-1878.
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