2021 1st Odisha International Conference on Electrical Power Engineering, Communication and Computing Technology (ODICON)

Wireless Bus Identification System for Visually

2021 1st Odisha International Conference on Electrical Power Engineering, Communication and Computing Technology(ODICON) | 978-1-7281-7663-5/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ODICON50556.2021.9429012

Impaired Person
Arun Agarwal Kabita Agarwal Ramachandra Agrawal
Department of IEE, College of Department of EE, ITER
Department of EIE, ITER Engineering & Technology Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan Deemed to be
Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan Deemed to be Kalinga Nagar, Ghatikia, University, Khandagiri Square
University, Khandagiri Square Bhubaneswar-751003,Odisha, India Bhubaneswar-751030, Odisha, India
Bhubaneswar-751030, Odisha, India akkavita22@gmail.com ramachandra1agrawal@gmail.com
arunagrawal@soa.ac.in
Alok Kumar Mishra Narayan Nahak
Akshaya kumar Patra Department of EE, ITER
Department of EEE, ITER
Department of EEE, ITER Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan Deemed to be Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan Deemed to be
Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan Deemed to be University, Khandagiri Square University, Khandagiri Square
University, Khandagiri Square Bhubaneswar-751030, Odisha, India Bhubaneswar-751030, Odisha, India
Bhubaneswar-751030, Odisha, India alokmishra@soa.ac.in narayannahak@soa.ac.in
akshaypatra@soa.ac.in

Abstract— The goal of this work RF based Wireless
communication is to simplify the traveling and movement of
visually impaired person. As someone who is totally blind,
every day presents its own challenge. But the biggest problem
still remains are traveling in public transport. Usually
travelling by bus is considered to be safe and comfortable but
when it comes to outdoor environments then it very difficult to
manage navigation for people who are born completely blind.
In the bus transport system, the route numbers are only
displayed on the number plate due to which a visually
challenged person has to rely on sighted assistance that also
makes them dependent on others and lowers their self-esteem.
Visually impaired people have adopted various measures to
access public transport that make them dependent on others
that are sometimes unreliable. So, keeping in mind these
problems we have come up with an idea to help exclusively for
visually impaired persons who are the daily commuters
accessing public transport by the use of recent advancements
in the technology. The purpose of this is to design and propose
a model that will help the visually disabled person to navigate
in outdoor surroundings and fulfill their requirement of
identification. The proposed system consists of two detection
subsystems: (i) Visually impaired person’s personal assistance
segment, and, (ii) Bus driver’s segment. When the user (blind
person) reaches the bus station and switches on his device, the
ultrasonic sensor senses the presence of the bus in the nearby
area and transmits the bus presence to the Arduino. To this,
the buzzer beeps and the visually impaired person get to know
about the presence of the bus in the nearby area. The blind
person then turns on the toggle switch on the user module,
thereby indicating his presence to the bus driver. Henceforth,
begins the working of bus driver’s module. The information
transmitted by the blind person is received by the receiver
installed on bus driver’s module and thereby gets notified by a
buzzer. In order to reply to the blind person, the bus driver
takes the help of a Bluetooth application which has a wireless
connection with the Bluetooth module installed over the user’s
module from his phone. The bus driver sends an
acknowledgement to the blind person by entering an alphabet
‘a’ from the Bluetooth app. The second buzzer installed in the
blind person’s device beeps on receiving the acknowledgement,
thereby confirming his presence. Thus by this way, wireless
communication is carried out between the bus driver and the
visually impaired person using RF module. The result shows
that the proposed system is exhibiting a better safety, cost and
practicality in performance.
Keywords—RF, visually impaired, arduino, Bluetooth,
wireless communication module,
I. INTRODUCTION
Completely blind people or have congenital blindness
very frequently face problems every time as they step out
their home or offices or the places they are acquainted. They
face many challenges in day to day life that includes
traveling or merely walking down a crowded lane, also they
must memorize the location of every obstacle or item in
their environment. To enjoy life with ease and comfort, one
requires the ability to move freely, smoothly and
independently from one place to another using the modes of
transportation. However, no one can simply depend on
others for his own traveling like some categories of disabled
people (especially visually impaired person) do. Blind
people are limited to the type of transportation they can use.
In many countries, public transport is the highly preferred
means for majority of blind people. In this scenario, they
face difficulties in identification and estimating the arrival
of buses at the bus stations. Further, they are unable to
browse the bus variety to spot the right bus to board.
Hence, we got motivated for would like to make their
lives better by implementing an idea which will be
beneficial to them to relish transportation services easily and
freely like normal individuals, while not looking forward to
others hand. Thus it will help the visually impaired people
gain confidence to move around independently.
We hope that the idea proposed by us can relief many
difficulties of the visually impaired people and can make
their life more comfortable and easier.
A. Applicability
This idea is applicable to all types of transportation, be it
public or private which will help the visually impaired
person in safer travelling and navigation. As an initial step
we have applied this idea to a bus system to check its
feasibility and reliability. Further an extension to this
application can bring new discoveries not only for public
transport but also for private assistance.

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 II. PROJECT SEPCIFICATION
Bus recognition system consists of ARDUNIO, an
ultrasonic sensor, a RF module, an encoder decoder and a
Bluetooth module. RF module consists of a transmitter and a
receiver that is used to transmit and receive the signals from
the blind person’s device to the bus driver’s device and vice-
versa. These transmitters and receivers are interfaced with
the encoder and decoder respectively. First of all, the
ultrasonic sensor will detect the presence of the bus in the
nearby area for the visually impaired person. As soon as, the
blind person get notified about the bus presence through a Fig. 2. Block diagram for bus driver’s device.
buzzer, he will turn on the toggle switch present on his
module and thus his information will be sent to the bus A. ARDUINO UNO
driver. Now, as bus driver gets the blind person’s presence,
he will acknowledge him through a mobile application which ARDUINO is an open source physical processing stage in
has a wireless connection with the user’s module using light of a micro controller board and a coordinated
Bluetooth. advancement condition to program the board. ARDUINO
UNO is a micro-controller board based on the AT mega
The mobile application used by the bus driver is based on 328P. The microcontroller has in total 14 digital input
Bluetooth connection in which the bus driver will give the output pins, out of which 6 pins for PWM outputs and 6
input ‘a’ for sending acknowledgement to the blind person numbers of analog input pins, one pin as USB connector, a
and he will get notified about the bus using a third buzzer power jack and a reset button as depicted in figure 3 below.
installed in the user module. To make the third buzzer stop,
the bus driver has to give the input ‘b’. This is how a B. BLUETOOTH MODULE
wireless connection is set up between a blind person and a For the communication between cell phones and micro
bus driver and thus the blind person can board the desired controller Bluetooth module (HC-05) is used. HC-05 is a
bus to reach his destination without being dependent on Bluetooth gadget utilized for remote communication with
others. Bluetooth empowered devices (like smart phones) as shown
in figure 4 below. Bluetooth is technology for wireless
III. DESIGN SCHEME AND COPONENT DESIGN communication. It is designed to use cable connection. It
Figure 1 below presents the block diagram for visually has 6 pins but we generally care about 4 of them namely Rx,
impaired person’s device. Tx, VCC (5V), and Gnd.

Fig. 3. Pin diagram of Arduino Uno .

Fig. 1. Block diagram for visually impaired person device.

Figure 2 below presents the block diagram for bus

driver’s device.

Fig. 4. Diagram of blueetooth module .

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C. ULTRASONIC SENSOR (HC SR-04)
As depicted in figure 5 below it measures distances based
on transmitting and receiving ultrasonic signals. These are
reliable, cost effective instruments for wireless applications.
D. RF MODULE
It is a small electronic device shown in figure 6
responsible for transmission and reception of RF radio
signals between two devices. It consists of Transmitter and
receiver which are of various types and frequency ranges.
E. AT MEGA 16 MICROCONTROLLER
It has a 16kb programmable flash memory, static RAM of
It is a 40 pins low power 8 bit microcontroller based on
AVR architecture 1kb as depicted in figure 7.
F. ENCODER (HT12E)
The encoder has a job to convert 12 bit parallel data into
serial output which can be finally transmitted through a RF
transmitter. This module has lower power consumption and
offers excellent immunity against noise. It is shown in figure
8 below.

Fig. 7. AT mega 16 microcontroller.

Fig. 5. Ultrasonic sensor module .

Fig. 8. Encoder.

G. DECODER (HT12D)
As presented in figure 9 it is a device that translates
encoded data into its original format.

Fig. 6. RF module .

Fig. 9. Decoder.

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H. POWER SUPPLY
This is the main electronic circuit to supply dc voltage to
all other circuits for operation as depicted in figure 11 below.
The input voltage from the ac mains is 230V, 50 Hz. The
output of this power supply is 5V DC which is desired by all
circuit components to run. A step down transformer down
converts the input ac mains to 12V AC. A bridge diode
rectifier circuit further converts this to 12V DC. But there is
a presence of unwanted ripple frequencies at the output of
rectifier which is known as Pulsating DC. It is eliminated by
placing a capacitor filter also known as smoothed DC power
filter circuits. Here a capacitor is used. Finally, by using a
positive voltage regulator chip 7805, we convert the 12V DC
down to 5V. Therefore, we obtain a clean fixed DC voltage
of 5V.
IV. IMPLEMENATION AND DESIGN EVOLUTION Fig. 10. Implemenation on board.

When the bus driver sends ‘a’ through his smart phone For the ultrasonic sensor to detect the object:
the Bluetooth module receives the signal and send it to the
micro controller and the buzzer will beep giving the #include<avr/io.h>
acknowledgement to the blind person. #define F_CPU 1000000
When the sends ‘b’ through his smart phone the #include<avr/usart.h>
Bluetooth module receives the signal and send it to the micro
controller then the buzzer will stop to beep. void main ()
A. Arduino Programming {

For Bluetooth module that can be used by the bus PORTB=output

driver using an application: If (distance < 30cm)
#include<avr/io.h> {
#define F_CPU 1000000 B0=1;
#include<avr/usart.h> Delay = 3sec;
void main() B0 =1;
{ }
PORTB=output
if(input_value==a)
{
B0=1;
}
Fig. 11. Block diagram of regulated power supply.
if (input_value==b)
{
B0=0;
}
}

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Fig. 12. Snapshot of working.
Blind people usually face problems navigating outside
their friendly environment. For helping these visually
impaired people, there are many technologies developed to
help them navigating and travelling across the lanes. But
these technologies are to help these people to walk and cross
the roads like canes, stick etc. There were no technologies to
help them access the public transport. So these problems
needed some permanent solution and study of a journal
related to this topic led to the evolution of this idea. So we
thought to design a bus identification system that would help
the visually impaired person to sense the presence of a bus
using ultrasonic sensor and carry out traveling in public
transport system without the help of sighted person. Earlier
in the past various other steps have been discovered to help
the visually impaired person such as bus identification
system using RFID, etc but we have tried to implement this
idea at minimum cost and steps.
V. TESTING, ANALYSIS AND E VALUATION
A. Relevance
Our project is relevant up to a particular range for which
desired results will be obtained. It can be used for a
particular section of society I.e.; visually impaired people
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now but after some improvements, it can also be used for
other sections of our society.
B. Effectiveness
Our project uses a ultrasonic sensor which is used to
sense any object in a nearby area or it’s given range. We
have used a range of 30m for the ultrasonic sensor in our
project. If we would have increased the range of the ultra-
sonic sensor, it could have sensed or detected every
obstruction within its range. So, we have used a low range
which will ease the detection of bus.
C. Efficiency
Our project is efficient within a particular short range
where fewer obstructions can be detected. It can be made
more efficient by developing an mobile based application
and feeding the image of buses by using applications of the
image processing and introducing a braille keyboard to the
user’s module so that the user can feed the desired bus
number to board the particular bus.
VI. PROBLEMS, FAULTS, BUGS AND CHALLENGES
A. Problems
As a second option we could have used ZigBee in place
of RF module but since it’s cost is much higher so we opted
for RF module and a Bluetooth module which provide better
result at comparatively low cost.
B. Faults
Initially, we used two RF modules which caused
unwanted interference i.e., the information sent by the
transmitter of the first RF module could not reach the
receiver of the second module. Rather, due to interference it
was received by the receiver of the first module thereby
blocking the resultant output.
C. Bugs
We have fed the programming’s to control the micro
controllers and the Bluetooth device to set up a
communication between the user device and the bus module
using wireless communication by ARDUINO UNO. We
have face some problems related to the errors while
executing the programs and rectified the bugs and run time
errors.
D. Challenges
The biggest challenge faced by us was to control the
interference caused due to the presence of two RF modules.
We overcame the challenge by using one RF module and a
Bluetooth module thereby leading to the desired result.
VII. CONCLUSION
In today’s competitive world where everyone wants to
move as fast as possible, it becomes difficult for visually
impaired people to cope with their immediate surroundings.
So in order to help them to take easy steps towards their
development we came up with an idea where the visually
impaired person can easily identify the vehicle he/she wants
to board and reduce the time taken by them in such activities
so that they can carry out other useful activities with ample
time and accuracy. This idea helped us to know more about
the lives of the visually impaired people and how difficult it
becomes at different times and situations to earn for a normal
life. The implementation of this idea is just an initial step to
help them to curb their problems and run a smooth and easy [1]
life. An extension to this idea in the near future can also
bring other technological advancements which can make the
life of visually impaired people even more better on a large
scale but for now this would benefit small section of the [2]
society to help them move out from their dark world and can
explore the opportunities that normal human beings do in
their day-to-day life. Thus they can become independent and [3]
do not have to rely on others shoulders for their travelling
and navigation. [4]
[5]
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REFERENCES
Mohd Zikrul Hakim Noor, I. Ismail and M. F. Saaid, "Bus detection
device for the blind using RFID application," 2009 5th International
Colloquium on Signal Processing & Its Applications, Kuala Lumpur,
2009, pp. 247-249.
S. Abdullah, N. M. Noor and M. Z. Ghazali, "Mobility recognition
system for the visually impaired," 2014 IEEE 2nd International
Symposium on Telecommunication Technologies (ISTT), Langkawi,
2014, pp. 362-367.
International Journal of Engineering Research and Applications
(IJERA) ISSN: 2248-9622
International Conference on Industrial Automation and Computing
(ICIAC- 12-13th April 2014) :
http://www.ijera.com/special_issue/ICIAC_April_2014/EN/V7/EN-
2604549.pdf