A Winner is Me! – Winning the Geodan Research Hackathon!

Every year, Geodan’s research department hosts a 2-day hackathon as a change of pace. This year, Geodan became an official partner of the Johan Cruijff ArenA! To celebrate this, the hackthon was hosted in the Madrid ’69 conference room at the famous Dutch stadium with the theme “Smart Stadium” Our team was given the Segway Loomo, a combination of a self-balancing vehicle and a robot! We then had to figure out how to use it! The team cosisted of Steven Bos, Anne Blankert and myself.

We settled on the idea of a robotic guide dog. Indoor navigation is a big problem for blind people, especially when they have never visited the building. Enter Foloomo, the robotic guide dog!

In the past Geodan Reasearch worked with Bartimeus, to create an indoor-navigation app for the blind called “De Virtuele Geleidelijn” (The Virtual Guideline). With some trial and error and hacker magic from our teammate Anne , we figured out how to have the app send commands to Loomo. The robot can now follow pre-defined paths using app’s SLAM system based on Google Tango. This concept could be used to make robotic guides for blind visitors.