SBIR Phase II: AI-Driven Orientation and Mobility System for the Blind

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project is to advance computer vision for navigation to support independence for individuals with visual impairment. Roughly eight 8 million individuals in the US live with blindness or visual impairment, which severely reduces a person’s ability to independently navigate in new spaces and consequently limits participation in social and economic life. The lack of independence directly leads to disadvantages in completing formal education and joining the workforce. This project is aimed at creating a breakthrough orientation and mobility system as an application narrating environments and providing the ability to record and retrace routes in indoor environments. The core technological innovation is a multimodal neural network architecture capable of learning robust spatial representations and efficiently operating on mobile devices. The proposed project will introduce a novel artificial intelligence (AI)-driven Orientation and Mobility System to assist individuals with visual impairment in crucial navigation tasks. This proposal will generate contextually relevant, task-oriented spatial information from smartphone cameras. The research tasks include: (1) Development of optimization and data augmentation techniques for improved runtime performance for a broad range of mobile devices; (2) Development of verbal narration of environments as well as route creation and tracking, (3) Co-design and testing with potential users. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.