Nik Melchior is a third year Ph.D. Student at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. His research interests include path planning for rovers in rough terrain, as well as cooperation and communication within human/robot teams. Nik received his bachelor's degree in computer engineering and master's degree in computer science from Washington University in St. Louis.

The goal of BlindAid is to develop navigational assistance technology for the blind or visually impaired. We seek to create a portable Electronic Travel Aid (ETA) for visually impaired users, along with the accompanying radio frequency identification (RFID) localization infrastructure used to equip buildings.

There has been little done in regards to indoor navigation in current assistive technologies, known as Electronic Orientation Aids (EOA), possibly due to high cost for instrumentation and limited capabilities. BlindAid's goal is to break down these barriers by introducing an EOA system which is relatively inexpensive for both the blind and the businesses that equip their buildings. We propose using RFID tags to set up a location-tagging infrastructure within buildings such that the blind can use an RFID equipped ETA (such as a cell phone) to determine their location as well as software that can utilize this localization data to generate vocal directions to reach a destination.