Edge Sensing

January 2021 - May 2021

Team: Drew Miller, Jamie Walton, Tino Trangia, Adit Roychowdhury, Esther Shin, Emma Stephan

We had the opportunity to partner with Danny Stickney, a Bay area resident and wheelchair user. He has cerebral palsy and a cortical visual impairment, which makes it difficult to detect changes in elevation and other obstacles nearby. Our project works to attach an edge sensing system to his wheelchair to ease Danny's mobility through his day-to-day.

This project was an ongoing initative by previous Edge Sensing teams of UC Berkeley's EnableTech Club. This semester's objective was to swap out the existing edge sensing technology with less invasive ones. The existing system provided auditory alerts when near an edge/obstacle detection occured. However, we found that the auditory response was obtrusive in public situations, discomforting Danny and others around him. Our solution was to use 4 separate actuators to provide directional haptic feedback instead. The existing IR sensor modules was used and only the method of feedback was changed.