For last couple years I've been doing
these capstone design projects so that's
a two semester course that every senior
Electrical Engineering has to take in
order to graduate
the intelligent white cane is one of
those projects that came to us from the
outside but we we thought that was a
great task to try and undertake the idea
was take the white cane and kind of
leave it alone because most sight
impaired people have trained on how to
use that so this project was interesting
in that we collaborated with mechanical
engineering students also and they've
worked on the 3d design and modeling of
both an improved handle and an improved
tip for the cane what we did in
electrical engineering is the students
built this box and it's a prototype of
course so it looks very kind of crude
but that's because we're really
interested in the circuitry we bought
ultrasonic sensors so these things are
like like a bat you know they send out a
sound and receive it back and it tells
you the distance to an object and
there's five of them on the box so you
can get left shoulder right shoulder
overhead down at the floor and then
another one to just follow somebody the
other key part of it is bone conducting
headphones so those look like regular
headphones but they fit in front of your
ear we're trying to miniaturize
everything and then come up with a form
that's sort of more integrated into the
cane and then of course continuing to
perfect the circuitry in the operation
so so my vision is to really succeed at
that at finding all the components in a
you know sort of half size or something
now we've already done that with the
microcontroller we've got a much smaller
version of that the wiring and all that
can be integrated the sensors are the
current problem they're they're pretty
large they're about about a half inch in
diameter and they don't make them much
smaller I think there's some physical
limitations on getting them to work well
to make them any smaller but we're in
contact with the manufacturer of those
and we have some hopes that we can we
can improve that but that's the
direction we're headed where we're
hoping that we can get a prototype
that's to the point where you want to
show it off and demonstrate it
and then if it looks like it's worth
pursuing move it into production
and I don't mean large production I you
know hundreds of units not tens of
thousands I own research is a production
of New Mexico State University.
