The National Federation of the Blind Jernigan Institute
created the Blind Driver Challenge as a long-term plan of creating
a versatile vehicle that can be driven by people living with significant
visual impairments. Although this may seem overly ambitious, the
NSF has designed a multi-year plan that has broken down this daunting
task into a relatively feasible set of objectives that build upon
each other as the plan progresses
The broader goals of the Blind Driver Challenge are:
-
To directly stimulate innovation in development
of non-visual interfaces for ordinary road vehicles
- To indirectly encourage development of technologies necessary
to implement a fully functional vehicle for blind people that can
operate in all of the standard scenarios in which a sighted driver
can operate
Additionally, there are a number of collateral, broadly-applicable
benefits of this competition that are tangential to blindness issues,
such as:
- Development of systems for providing greater situational awareness
for anyone performing highly complex, time-critical tasks such
as piloting aircraft, operation of high-risk manufacturing elements,
and medical procedures
- Display of information in real-time where the heads-up environment
is already saturated. Possible uses include surgery, vehicles operated
in a combat environment, and survey vehicles
- Improvement of sighted driving simulators
through enhancement of understanding non-visual distractions
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