Taken from the Braille Monitor, December 2009.
The NFB Blind Driver Challenge
by Mark A. Riccobono
************
From the Editor: Mark Riccobono is the executive director of the NFB
Jernigan Institute. This is what he says about our plans to stimulate
development of a car that blind drivers can operate:
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We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this
decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they
are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of
our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing
to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to
win, and the others, too.
************
These words spoken by President John F. Kennedy in the fall of 1962
served as the rallying cry for a tremendous technological effort which has
forever changed America's capacity for innovation-the race to be the first
to the moon. If we were to substitute the words "drive a car" for the words
"go to the moon," we would have the imaginative challenge that Dr. Marc
Maurer, president of the National Federation of the Blind, has established
for the first decade of the NFB Jernigan Institute-the only research and
training facility developed and directed by the blind. We have now operated
a research and training institute for half a decade, and the importance of
the Blind driver challenge is still difficult to grasp for some. This
article is intended to build understanding of the tremendous opportunities
held in this imaginative challenge, to review where we are today and how we
will conquer the challenge in the next five years, and to rally our energy
and resources around this initiative so that we continue to drive our own
future.
************
Background
************
A significant piece of the American culture coming out of the
twentieth century is the automobile and the organization of our systems and
resources around it. The car is symbolic of freedom, power, status, and
mobility. Young children cannot wait until they can drive, those with cars
do not know what they would do without them, and those without cars
organize their resources to get one. The allure of the car and the
perceived opportunities that come with driving are so strong that, when one
loses the ability to drive-from blindness or some other cause-it is
frequently thought to be among the worst losses one must overcome. The
driving experience is so powerful that advertisers have gone to great
lengths to characterize the experience using many symbols and sensations.
For example, in the early part of this decade Pontiac created a commercial
to illustrate its tagline, "Fuel for the Soul." Their solution was to show
a woman wearing dark sunglasses driving in the desert. When the car stops,
the woman gets out and extends her long white cane. This symbolic scene was
intended to demonstrate the powerful connection to driving that goes beyond
seeing and to emphasize how central driving is in our society by
emphasizing how much the blind desire the freedom of driving.
Yet not everyone has viewed the automobile and driving as a panacea.
Thousands of people have spoken out and hundreds of organizations have been
formed to keep our cities walkable and to protect systems of public
transportation. As Will Rogers once summarized the spirit of these efforts,
"I represent what is left of a vanishing race, and that is the
pedestrian.... That I am still able to be here, I owe to a keen eye and a
nimble pair of legs." Debate continues today about the impact of the
automobile on our society; the effects on the environment; and, more
recently, the unintended consequences of making cars silent to pedestrians.
From the beginning, vision has been one of the primary qualifications
for receiving a license to drive automobiles. However, the blind have
effectively developed methods of getting where they want to go, when they
want to get there, without being behind the steering wheel. For decades
blind people have written about the empowering philosophy of the National
Federation of the Blind, pointing out that independence and freedom of
movement are not solely dependent on the ability to drive. The extensive
writing of leaders of the Federation has frequently used the management of
getting around without a car as an example of the way blindness can be
reduced to a mere inconvenience. Many blind people have owned cars and
managed their use for sighted spouses, children, and others. And many blind
people have actually driven cars with sighted friends in the passenger
seat. For the organized blind, driving is not essential to success.
However, this does not mean that blind people are uninterested in the
prospect of driving. A blind-drivable vehicle appears high on the grand
wish list for many blind people.
In 1999 the National Federation of the Blind began raising money to
build the NFB Jernigan Institute-at the time referred to as the NFB
Research and Training Institute. In response to the question of what this
institute might do that would be dramatically different from current
research and training for the blind, NFB President Marc Maurer speculated
that the creation of technologies to empower a blind person to drive a car
would be among the Institute's imaginative projects. Dr. Maurer's visionary
outlook on a blind-drivable vehicle has always been presented with clear
purpose. It is not as much the end goal of driving that is important but
rather the innovative bringing together of intellectual resources and the
unique experience of the organized blind.
Consider this excerpt from Dr. Maurer's presentation to the ground
breaking for the Institute in the fall of 2001: "The facility is essential,
but the brick and mortar and steel cannot by themselves do what must be
done. For this we must have hands-the instruments of human endeavor that
carry out the imaginative essence of our being. The hands are those of
researchers who will create products to expand access for the blind to
information, to the transportation system, to the business community, and
to other elements within our society. The hands are those of teachers who
will inaugurate training programs that broaden the horizon for the blind
and for others. The hands are those of contributors who have had the faith
to join with us to dream of a brighter tomorrow."
During the Institute's grand opening celebration on January 30, 2004,
the NFB put the blind driver challenge on display for the first time with a
mock-up of a blind-drivable vehicle. During that occasion Dr. Maurer said
in part, "As we explore new methods of understanding, the individual
experiences of blind people must be a part of the pattern. We as a society
must use the talents each of us possesses. If we do, it will be good for
the individuals involved, but it will also serve society as a whole. Our
effort today is to expand knowledge into realms that have been previously
unexplored. We will use the tools that are available--those that we have
built and those that we can gather from the efforts of others. But of most
importance in our quest for knowledge is the spirit that we bring to the
task--a spirit that longs for independence, that seeks to be a part of the
community in which we live, that yearns for our talents to be employed in
building that community." This is the spirit of the NFB blind driver
challenge (NFB-BDC)
**********
What is the NFB blind driver challenge? The NFB Jernigan Institute
challenges universities, technology developers, and other interested
innovators to establish NFB blind driver challenge teams, in collaboration
with the NFB, to build interface technologies that will empower blind
people to drive a car independently. The challenge is not the development
of a car that drives a blind person around. The challenge is a car that has
enough innovative technology to convey real-time information about the
driving conditions to the blind so that people who possess capacity, an
ability to think and react, and a spirit of adventure, in addition to
having the characteristic of blindness, can interpret these data and
maneuver a car safely.
The purpose of the NFB blind driver challenge is to stimulate
innovative nonvisual technological innovation through the National
Federation of the Blind Jernigan Institute. The goals of this initiative
are:
1. To establish a path of technological advancement for nonvisual access
technology and close the gap between access technology and general
technology.
2. To increase awareness within the university scientific community about
the real problems facing the blind by providing expertise from the
perspective of the blind for a difficult engineering challenge.
3. To demonstrate that vision is not a requirement for success and that the
application of innovative nonvisual solutions to difficult problems can
create new opportunities for hundreds of thousands of people-blind and
sighted.
4. To change the public perceptions about the blind by creating
opportunities for the public to view the blind as individuals with
capacity, ambition, and a drive for greater independence.
The NFB-BDC is not an attempt to duplicate existing autonomous vehicle
projects. While a blind-drivable vehicle will likely take advantage of
systems used in autonomous vehicles, the goal is to have powerful interface
systems that allow the blind person to make driving decisions independent
of computer technology in the vehicle. The importance of the NFB-BDC is the
path of technological innovation created by the effort to meet the end goal
of independently driving a vehicle. This is not unlike the race to the moon
of the 1960s. The technologies created to get the United States to the moon
have had profound impact on our society. Likewise, the innovations of the
NFB-BDC will forever change the way we view technologies for the blind as
well as the capacity for excellence possessed by the blind themselves.
Additionally, the NFB-BDC does not replace the unwavering support of
the organized blind for systems of public transportation. The goal is not
to eliminate the blind from Will Rogers's "vanishing race" of pedestrians.
The blind, like the rest of society, will continue to need a variety of
options for independent movement throughout our communities. Yet even after
almost seventy years of work by the National Federation of the Blind, many
blind people and their sighted friends and families expect very little from
blind people in the way of independent travel and mobility. Despite access
to systems of public transportation in many cities, many blind people have
not learned the techniques of independent travel and been empowered with
the understanding that blindness need not limit their freedom of movement
within the community. The NFB-BDC will be one more significant blow in
shattering the low expectations for the blind and expanding the horizons of
public opinion about the capacity of the blind to participate fully in
society. Furthermore, the NFB-BDC may innovate technologies that improve
systems of public transportation in ways we have not yet imagined. In fact,
it may be that soon the blind themselves, those needlessly encouraged to
sit in the bus seats reserved for the handicapped, will soon be in the very
front seat driving the bus.
[PHOTO CAPTION: Addison Hugen drives the prototype with Virginia Tech
student Greg Jannaman along as passenger and advisor.]
What is the status of the NFB-BDC? For the first five years of the
NFB Jernigan Institute, the blind driver challenge has served as a call to
action for engineers and other bright minds to work on innovative
technologies. Additionally, the challenge has helped to create a perceptual
shift among technology developers about the type of technology the blind
wish to have and how they intend to participate in society. A number of
discussions have been held with engineers at prestigious universities, and
dozens have expressed interest in the challenge.
However, to date only one university has acted on the challenge.
Undergraduate students at Virginia Tech University, under the direction of
innovative professor Dr. Dennis Hong, have been actively working with the
NFB on the challenge. During the summer of 2009 the Virginia Tech BDC team
worked with blind students in the NFB Youth Slam on the first generation of
a blind-drivable vehicle, and many of the Slam students had the opportunity
to drive using the first generation of the nonvisual interface.
While our progress over the first five years on this initiative has
been slow, we find great encouragement in the perceptual shift that many of
our engineering partners have made. It has been said that Henry Ford's
success was not as much the creation of the assembly line as it was the
creation of an atmosphere in which innovation was the real product. We have
been successful in changing perceptions, raising expectations, and winning
the support of many bright minds. If, in the next five years of our
institute, we are to achieve a blind-drivable vehicle that can cruise on
the roads of America, we need to make a dramatic commitment to that end.
************
[PHOTO CAPTION: Angel Reyes, driving under sleepshades, and Greg Jannaman
in the Virginia Tech prototype]
The 2011 Challenge
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The challenge is clear, the opportunity is endless, and the time is
now. The National Federation of the Blind intends to put a vehicle on the
road in 2011 to bring public attention to the future full of opportunities
being built through the Federation's work in all parts of this country. We
intend to organize an effort not only to put a car on the road, but to get
blind people to drive it from the NFB Jernigan Institute to the NFB's
national convention in 2011. This goal will, without doubt, serve to
organize and measure the best of our energies and skills. But our
collective energy and talent are up to the challenge, for the average
experience of every blind person is one of frustration with the public
misconceptions of their ability and a lack of innovative approaches to
solving the real problems of blindness. And collectively the blind have
hopes and dreams that we are turning into imaginative programs through our
Jernigan Institute. The 2011 NFB blind driver challenge will accelerate
that effort, push the horizons, and stimulate more innovation around
nonvisual access than has ever been concentrated in one effort.
During the coming months more details about the 2011 NFB Blind Driver
Challenge will be available, including the grassroots efforts that will be
required of the blind of America in order to meet the goal and hit the
road. The key to this effort is the fuel of our imagination, and collective
energy as a movement, and a faith in our dreams for the future, a faith
that Dr. Jacobus tenBroek described as "a faith that can move mountains and
mount movements." The movement in this case is, not just one touched by
four tires, but one that will touch the hearts and minds of thousands in a
way that will drive innovation and expand the horizons of our future.
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