Home // International Journal On Advances in Life Sciences, volume 15, numbers 3 and 4, 2023 // View article
Authors:
Florian von Zabiensky
Grigory Fridman
Sebastian Reuter
Oguz Özdemir
Michael Kreutzer
Diethelm Bienhaus
Keywords: ETA; electronic travel aid; mobility aid; ROS 2; ROS; robot operating system; component-based development; user-centered design
Abstract:
Electronic Travel Aids are devices that help people with visual impairments navigate and orient themselves. The development of such devices is often associated with a loss of time in repetitive work, resulting in slow progress in this field. A collaborative community that shares its expertise could accelerate this progress and lead to truly useful and market-ready products for visually impaired people. To make such an exchange efficient, a standardized, component-based ecosystem is required. So far, such an approach for Electronic Travel Aids has not been pursued in the literature and is therefore addressed in this paper. To this end, a model for identifying component boundaries is presented and illustrated by a project in the form of an ultra-wideband indoor navigation system. The advantages of such a component-based development in general are described. In particular, the use of the Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) for the implementation is highlighted and its suitability for such an ecosystem is discussed based on practical experience with it. The evaluation of such an ETA with the use of the ROS 2 ecosystem and a component-based ETA are also highlighted. The contribution of this work is a framework that reduces the effort for the development and evaluation of electronic travel aids and allows an early involvement of users in the development process.
Pages: 87 to 98
Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2023. Used with permission.
Publication date: December 30, 2023
Published in: journal
ISSN: 1942-2660