Design and study of mechatronic system for assisting blind people to recognize patterns

This research aims to study and design a mechatronic system capable of rendering images through a touchable surface to help the blind to read and understand these images. This system uses mechanical and electronic techniques and integrated software to convert the gray image to a three-dimensional surface. The mechanical mechanisms used with the control systems have been studied to reach the design that is capable of transferring the fixed images to the mechanical system with the possibility of forming surfaces with suitable accuracy. The gray levels in the stationary images were represented as a mathematical variable that changes on the Z axis in terms of Cartesian coordinates where zero is considered black, and the maximum value expresses the white and gray levels within the linear area of these two points The “Afroge” image processing library was used with the C# programming language to build an interface for analysis and communication with the Arduino controllers, which acted as an intermediary to link the image data and the mechanical device (tactile display) to display images for the blind. Finally all designed systems (mechanical, electronic and software) have been tested after they have been successfully designed. Training of a group of blind people was conducted to test the system on several samples of images of different forms and the system has demonstrated its ability to transmit multiple types of information.