VIS

About the Discipline

Navigating with smart vision assistive technology

One of the two new disciplines in the CYBATHLON competition! People with severe visual impairment or complete loss of vision lack the most basic information about their environment, which limits their autonomy in completing many activities of daily living. Simple situations such as selecting colour-matching clothes or identifying a desired product in the supermarket can become a challenge. Unexpected road works on the daily commute can lead to hazardous situations. New technologies such as intelligent white cane help to provide information about the environment that is otherwise accessed through vision by rendering the information to the available senses, such as touch or hearing. While there is a wide range of vision aids available on the market, based on a variety of approaches (e.g., computer vision or artificial intelligence), their functions are usually restricted to specific domains (e.g., reading a text aloud or identifying a colour), or are impractical to use. Smart vision assistive technology that provides an intuitive, comprehensive, and reliable substitute for vision has the promising potential to improve the quality of live and autonomy of people with severe visual impairment or complete loss of vision.

The competition tasks will include elements of spatial orientation and personal mobility, such as boarding and leaving a public bus, which must be tackled under a time constraint. Pilots have to be able to recognise the context of a task and avoid obstacles. Some of the competition tasks will contain dynamic elements to which the pilots have to react.