Safe Travel
Safe Travel is a prototype to improve the travel experience of blind people in public transportation by using geolocation information from global navigation satellite systems.
Overview
Safe Travel was designed during 2014 for the Science Fair called EXPOTEC at Colegio Técnico Don Bosco (Don Bosco Technical High School), Costa Rica.
The system was designed to help blind people to have a better experience while traveling on the bus. For this reason, we developed a control panel with Braile numbered buttons, where each button was assigned to a specific bus stop. The system used GPS to calculate the distance between the bus and the bus stop. Once the bus was close enough to the stop, the system requested that the driver stop in the next possible stop.
Contributions
We used the GPS Shield for Arduino that used the NEO-6M receiver, with an external antenna, to simulate the GPS system that should be inside the bus, to track its position.
I programmed the Arduino to continuously check the current location of the bus and compare it with the location of the bus stop selected by the user.
Once the bus was close enough to the user’s stop, the system would activate the bus bell and a vibration motor that should be in the bus seat for disabled people to let them know that they are arriving to their destination.
I designed the circuit of the control panel. This was a simple circuit connected to the analog inputs of an Arduino UNO board. Using simple components, we could connect 5 buttons to each Analog Input. For this prototype, we used a route with 20 bus stops.
Results
That year, we won Second Place in the Electromechanics Category.
The project was developed by Nicole Peréz, Alejandro Retana, and Daniel Vargas.