2004 Botball Website Team Brenda Duong Syed Hashmi Anh Hoang Omar Nachawati Michael Samson For more information regarding assistive robotics and blind driving, refer to our bibliography page.

Analysis of the Problem There has been technology developed to help the completely and partially blind drive, such as by restoring their sight with a bionic eye, or eye surgery. There are also ideas of computer-controlled cars. These technologies work, but have flaws that will cause them to severely slow down in production. The bionic eye will restore some sight to the completely blind, but will only allow them to see a black and white dot matrix pattern. This technology will let the patient somewhat drive. It will allow the patient to see if there is an obstruction near or in front of him/her, allowing him/her to avoid hitting something or someone, but even though you are no longer blind, you will still be blind to some objects, mostly due to the situation. This technology is still in the testing stage, but is being stalled do to the fact that FDA regulations prohibit the procedure in the United States, and testing is being held in Portugal. The cost of this procedure also holds back its production. The operation, equipment and the necessary training cost $70,000 per patient. This technology also does not work for that 1 to 2 percent of the blind population that became blind as children or even earlier. Eye surgery is another alternative to blindness that only works for the partially blind. This procedure is slightly being stalled due to the price, and number of necessary operations. This procedure, could end-up costing $100,000’s of dollars, and after surgery, you could be coming back for a second. This procedure could also cause you to go permanently blind. There are also ideas of computer-controlled car, which are severally being stalled. One of the ideas involve servo-mechanisms that sense a cable buried in the roadway, for the car to follow, and some other mechanisms for sensing the distance of the car ahead, preventing accidents. The flaws of this idea though are that the mechanisms must be installed on all cars, so that the mechanisms can sense all surrounding cars, or else it’s useless. Laying all the cable, and installing all the mechanisms will also become extremely expensive. Another idea is to install cameras onto the cars, that will take pictures of the surroundings, sending them to an onboard computer, which will steer the car using the pictures, and accelerated and decelerate according to the speed limit, which will be sent to it via satellite, and surrounding conditions. This idea though will also be expensive, and will require more advances in analyzing technology.