Submit Manuscript | http://medcraveonline.com Introduction Now days through technology we can develop equipments that can ease peoples’ lives. The use of technology in facilitating blind people is one of the important research areas which need exploration. 1 It is unsafe for blind people to walk freely out doors or in areas to which they are not familiar. It is need of the day and responsibility of researchers to use technology so that blind people should not rely on simple blind sticks. In this time of technology, with “internet of things” and “artifcial intelligence” it is possible to make blind people life much easier and safer. 2 We proposed a design of blind stick which is based on artifcial intelligent (AI) 3 which can sense the obstacles in different directions. It helps the user to select the path free of any obstacle. The directions about right path are given via audio voice. Blind sticks have been designed earlier which can detect obstacles coming in front of blind people’s way, but they were not designed to tell the size of obstacle or distance from obstacle. 4,5 The direction of our research effort is to keep blind friend informed about the size and distance from obstacle that is it is near or far. Based on this information recommendation about directions in a path to follow are given. Intelligent blind stick facilitates blind friends’ lives and gives them protection. AI based blind stick is an innovative stick designed for visually disabled people in order to provide them improved navigation and helping them in making smart decisions about the selection of path that has no obstacle till a certain distance. Our search space involves searching a best suited path for a blind friend by using three ultrasonic sensors from front, left and right that will search the best path which does not have an obstacle at a certain distance. These sensors sense the obstacles through ultrasonic waves and direct blind friend to the direction that is clear of any obstruction to a certain distance. The knowledge is acquired through three sensors that senses the distance of obstacle. This sensor feedback is compiled and through audio facility communicated to blind person which I is then used for decision making in selecting the path having no obstruction. The research paper is organized in 5 Sections. In Section 2 we have covered the related work. Section 3 is about the methodology of our proposed work. Section 4 briefy explains the results and lastly we end up with conclusion in Section 5. Related work Many researchers have explored this area of research and signifcant work is done for blind friends. Many ultrasonic blind sticks have been made to facilitate blind friends but they are not intelligent. They have used buzzers and alarms for warning the blind friends but they do not direct them to choose the safe direction. 6 NAVBELT and GUIDCANE 7 are two robotics-based technologies that are used for obstacle avoidance for guiding blind friends. NAVBELT is a belt which contain array of ultrasonic sensors it basically guides the blind friend through stereo earphones about the direction through which they walk easily. It sends acoustic signals to user but it doesn’t help in fast walking because user cannot understand guidance signals in time. GUIDCANE uses 7 the same robotics technology but it guides the user through a wheel attached at the end of cane; when it detects an obstacle its wheel move in opposite direction and the user feels the movement and walk fast with it. In Ultrasonic Blind Walking Stick, 8 ultrasonic sensor is used to sense the obstacle (if there is any). The signal is then send to microcontroller to operate a buzzer. There is one more advantage of this system. Sometimes when the blind loses their sticks or forgot where they have put it, they can fnd it by using the wireless remote. Wearable obstacle avoidance 9 for blind has been created to ease blind people. Two ultrasonic sensors are attached on the glasses which send the direction and the size of obstacle through stereo audible sound via headphones. This helps user in walking. Methodology We have designed an artifcially intelligent blind stick that can detect the obstacle through ultrasonic sensor and inform the blind friend about it. Three ultrasonic sensors measures the distance of obstacle from left side, right side and front and through speech feature it directs the blind friend to make intelligent decisions for selecting a right direction that has no obstacle somewhere near. The methodology is shown in Figure 1.There are two main components. First are the sensing component and the other one is AI based decision making component. Sensing obstacles The purpose of this component is to sense the obstacles for which three ultrasonic sensors are used on the stick from front, left and right directions. The detection is done by calculating the time in which the ultrasonic wave returns back by refecting from an obstacle from each direction. The direction from which the wave returns in maximum time is the clear path. The sensors are programmed using Arduino UNO processor and Arduino IDE. The connections are made between Int Rob Auto J. 2018;4(1):68‒70. 68 © 2018 Ali et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and build upon your work non-commercially. Intelligent stick for blind friends Volume 4 Issue 1 - 2018 Uruba Ali, Hoorain Javed, Rekham Khan, Fouzia Jabeen, Noreen Akbar Department of Computer Science, Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Women University, Pakistan Correspondence: Fouzia Jabeen, Department of Computer Science, Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Women University, Pakistan, Email Received: January 29, 2018 | Published: February 20, 2018 Abstract Eyes are one of the most precious blessings of nature. Blind friends face a lot of difficulty in doing normal life activities. A lot of work has been done to ease blind people so that they can complete their tasks by themselves and not be able to depend on other people. Keeping this motivation in mind, in this article, we have proposed and developed a intelligent blind stick which uses sensors and microprocessor to help blind friends in walking. Keywords: blind friends, artificial intelligence, blind stick, path International Robotics & Automation Journal Research Article Open Access