Meet IC4U, a robot guide dog for the visually impaired and its creator, Selin Alara Ornek, who started building robots when she was 10. Read aloud in English the name of Ornek's latest robot is "I See For You" and it seems an ideal way to use robotics and AI for a good cause. 

The inspiration for building a robot guide dog came from seeing a real guide dog with its visually impaired owner and discovering how the dog would assist its owner. Having suffered the loss of the dog that had been her best friend when she was 8, Ornek was concerned about how sad a blind person would feel if their dog was to die - not only losing a friend but also losing their eyes again. 

Having decided to build a robot dog she contacted guide dog associations in the United States and the United Kingdom which provided her with information about how guide dogs train, behave, and their relationship with visually impaired people. One important feature she discovered was that, to cope with dangerous situations, a guide dog must learn not to obey the blind person’s command but instead become "intelligently disobedient" and take action accordingly and autonomously.

Ornek built the fist version of IC4U in 2018 with an Arduino Uno as the microprocessor. As well as being a Finalist in the Innovation Category of the 2018 European Youth Awards, IC4U was winner if the Hardware Category of the Coderdojo Coolest Projects held in Dublin, Ireland.

For the second version of IC4U, Ornek used a Rasppberry Pi 3B+ and installed a Google AIY Voice Kit which gave the visually impaired person the ability to give voice commands directly to the robot instead of via an mobile app. She also installed servo motors and added knee joints to enable IC4U to sit down, stand up, and lie down when told to do so. This version was the first to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect objects. It processed images using a Raspberry Pi Camera, TensorFlow,  the OpenCV Image Processing Library, and the “MS COCO” dataset. iC4U v2 used the Dialogflow platform to make conversation with the visually impaired person and others and Google Maps was included so that iC4U could provide directions.

Moving on to the third version, Ornek had considered adding lidar so that IC4Ucould map its surroundings in 3D. However she was advised by Professor Dr. Chris Verhoeven or TU Delft University that this would be overkill. Instead, following his advice, she added sound sensors so that when IC4U v3 first hears a sound its turn its head to look in that direction to process the object and a ZED 2i Wide-Angle 3D AI Camera so that it could detect the object from a wider angle and detect the size and speed of the object more accurately and intelligently. To power the ZED 2i camera and for higher-quality image processing she used an NVIDIA Jetson Nano.

Ornek was so impressed with the ZED 2i camera’s performance that she didn’t want to limit its use to a simple object recognition task and started to think of additional ways IC4U could help a visually impaired person. As a result IC4U v3 can recognize and report the value of banknotes. In addition, Ornek used the Jetson Nano to add a shopping feature to IC4U via web scraping from publicly available resources, aiming to one day expand it by partnering with online retail stores.

Ornek won the Young Maker Award in the 2022 Amazing Maker Awards with IC4U and was awarded the 3rd place prize of $2,000 in the OpenCV AI Competition 2023. Her latest award is Karen McKellin International Leader of Tomorrow Award, a scholarship that will enable her to study for a Bachelors degree in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia.

A report of Ornek's story on the Nvidia Blog notes that:

In the long run, Ornek hopes to deploy IC4U for use in smart cities and spaces — continuing her exploration of AI applications with next-generation platforms like Jetson Orin.

Nvidia encourages students and educators with a valid accredited university or education-related email address to sign up to purchase the Jetson Orin Nano or Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit at a discounted rate.

More Information

IC4U Project from Selin Alara Omek

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