Discover Magazine - July, 1998 - page 86 Discover Awards 1998 Robotics Winner: The University of Michigan's GuideCane Innovator: Johann Borenstein As head of the Mobile Robotics Lab at the University of Michigan, Johann Borenstein helps robots get a round, and none of them can see a thing. "It’s always been obvious," he says, "that the technology we have here could be useful to a blind person." A few years ago, Borenstein took a sonar device that helped one of his robots avoid obstacles and adapted it for humans, He translated the sonar's ultrasonic echoes into audible tones and fed them to stereo headphones. It didn't work. Blind users trying to interpret those cues quickly grew frustrated. Apparently getting a machine to detect obstacles is no big deal, but having it give directions to a human is. Whether you can see or not, you want something as intuitive as a tug on a leash. From here, building the device was relatively simple. A graduate student mounted a sonar device to a pair of wheels, like an upright vacuum cleaner, that would take evasive turns, left or right, steering you around an obstacle, and then continue in the original direction. Borenstein never intended to reinvent the Seeing Eye dog, but that is exactly where the logic of the problem led him. So how does his eight-pound GuideCane stack up against its canine competition? "It's much less expensive than a good guide dog," about $4,000, he estimates, versus $14,000 for a dog. And his machine doesn't need to be fed or relieve itself. "Many people who are blind," he adds, "find it difficult to take care of a dog. But of course, GuideCane gives no companionship." Borenstein demonstrated his GuideCane in August 1997, but it still needs tweaking: it has a habit of deviating from sidewalks and cuffing across lawns. And it would be better, sometimes, not to avoid an obstacle, such as a wall that happens to have a door. If Borenstein also succeeds in including global positioning satellite navigation, you could simply say, "Go to the supermarket on Main Street," and GuideCane would escort you there.