What is better than a billion dollars? No, not a trillion dollars. It is helping the most vulnerable among us. Rohan Paul did just that by inventing the SmartCane, an electronic travel aid for the visually impaired. It is a small, low-cost gadget that can be fitted on top of any white cane. Using ultrasonic ranging, it increases the detection range of a typical cane from 0.5 meters to 3 meters. It increases the spatial awareness of the users through vibration alerts that convey distance information. Rohan developed the SmartCane when he was an undergraduate student at the Indian Institute of Technology(IIT), Delhi. Now, he is at the Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship and is a first year Ph.D student working under Dr.Paul Newman in the Mobile Robotics Group. At Oxford, his work involves a much advanced variation on the work that he has done with SmartCane and involves giving mobile robots the ability to navigate and map dynamic real-world environments.