Stanford Researchers Build $400 Self-Navigating Smart Cane

This is incredibly cool, I had no idea that smart canes were a thing. It kind of reminds me of the little arrow pointing a walker or biker in a specific direction, but with added collision detection.

Also neat to see that it improved the users confidence allowing them to walk faster.

I wonder what price target would make these more practical.

Additionally, I wonder how the device handles going over a curb and potentially loosing a few degrees of precision each time?

Wasn't there a similar project that came out several years ago based on ultrasonic range sensors? https://github.com/AssistiveLabs/SynthSense