Vision Control of a Vehicle Intended for Tourist Routes Designed for People with Special Needs

Featured Application: The solution is used to control on-road and off-road vehicles, particularly off-road vehicles designed for mountain tourism for people with disabilities. The advantage of this solution is the low cost of the devices, which are based on inexpensive cameras. Off-road vehicles, including those intended for mountain tourism, are also designed for people with special needs. These designs primarily concern the design of the drive of the vehicle, which can be manual, foot-powered, electric or a combination of these. Unusual forms of controlling these vehicles are also used, which use various parts of the body for this purpose, including the torso. In addition to using specific parts of the body to control the vehicle, an alternative is to use vision for this purpose, such as through eye tracking and similar techniques. The problem with these applications is the high prices of the devices and software used. They are mainly implemented in military solutions. The cost of these forms of vehicle control is too high; often higher than the price of the vehicle. This article presents an overview of the broad concept and technical solutions used to control various vehicles using hardware that can interact with the organ of vision. An extremely cheap prototype of this type of solution for several dozen EUR is also proposed in this article. The device uses methods based on vision techniques using the OpenCV 4_11 library. The research results in this area are presented, stating that such control is efficient.