GuidePath

Inspiration

From our teammate , Cherie:

"Growing up with a brother who has a disability, I always looked at the world in a different light. I see what I can do but also observe what my brother can do and how I can help him. I want to always help my brother, but I think everyone should have the freedom that GuidePath attempts to offer."

What it does

At GuidedPath, we believe that everyone should be able to navigate public spaces with ease and confidence, regardless of their abilities. That’s why we’ve developed a system of compassionate guidance for accessible travels. Our solution allows those with disabilities such as vision impairment, wheelchair use, or old age to walk smoothly to accessibility points within public buildings such as schools, stores, libraries, and banks, giving them a peace of mind.

How we built its

We achieve this by obtaining architecture plans to map out possible paths and access points within these public spaces. In the future, we plan to send people down these paths to ensure their accuracy, and we’ll use robots to track these paths to give an accurate time estimate for how long it may take someone with disabilities to get from point A to an access point, providing even more certainty and peace of mind.

Challenges we ran into

Extracting usable and accurate pathfinding graphs from images of floorplans came with several challenges that extended the scope beyond our time allottment. Most of the difficulties lie in preprocessing images by filtering out text, reducing architectural features to simple lines and nodes, and identifying relevant features like doorways and stairs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the emphasis we placed in the project's equitable utility and in its potential integration with existing systems. We're also proud of the the image processing and graph traversal we were able to accomplish, even if we weren't able to implement a full technical solution.

What we learned

We learned efficient indoor route mapping is an active area of research, with current methods drawing from both crowdsourced geospatial data of smartphones and bluetooth landmarks built into newer facilities. Even the optimal placement of these bluetooth fiducials is a subject of current optimization research.

What's next for GuidePath

But our vision doesn’t stop there. In the future, we hope to integrate our solution with popular mapping applications like Google Maps, to help both disabled individuals and the elderly feel more freedom and mental well-being as they navigate the world, both indoors and outdoors. We believe that everyone deserves the right to independence and well-being, and we’re committed to making that a reality through our compassionate guidance for accessible travels.

Built With

• networkx
• numpy
• opencv
• openstreetmap
• python