Laptop Robot Exhibition Proposal
RoboHelper functionalities
The user
will select a destination from a selection menu requesting the robot courier
to delivery a payload to another location inside a building or to another
building on campus.
The robot will autonomously navigate to the destination
to deliver the payload. The robot will use a combination of motor encoder
sensors and camera vision to detect visual cues to navigate to the destination.
The robot guide is similar to the courier robot except that there is no
payload and robot guides the user to the destination based on the users
request.
Speech synthesis will also be used to notify the
user regarding the status of the request.
Robot Type
The robot
will be an autonomous laptop robot with wheel motion. The robot will have
the following components and sensors:
- Two electric motors for differential steering drive
- Dual motor driver board
- 12 Volt battery
- Hatachi or Handyboard microcontroller used as a custom speed control unit and sensor interface
- Two magnetic proximity type wheel encoders
- Laptop computer
- USB Lego Video camera
- Robot frame structure
- Sonar and IR sensors
- Store and retrieve contacts, appointments, and reminders using TTS and speech recognition
- Act as a mobile video conferencing unit *
- Retrieve news headlines, weather forecasts, and stock alerts, and using the TTS engine to read that information out loud *
- Retrieve and read email using the TTS engine. Convert voice to text and send email by using speech recognition technology *
*
- Requires wireless internet connectivity
Software Used
The robot
software will be written in C++ and the Intel Open Computer Vision library
will be used to provide autonomous control and vision capabilities. The
Microsoft speech SDK will be used to provide speech synthesis.The
Hatachi or Handyboard will be programmed using C like compilers provided
by the manufacturer of each board. Encoder, sonar, and IR sensors data
will be read from the laptop serial port connected to the microcontrollers,
which will transmit a sensor data packet stream.
Algorithms
The functionality
of the delivery guide robot will require path navigation and visual processing
capabilities. The robots environment will be represented by a graph data
structure with the possible destinations and visual landmarks represented
by the vertices of the graph. Simple visual cues will be placed in the
environment as navigation landmarks to aid the robot in navigation its
environment. Based on this information the robot will use encoder feedback
to make turns and travel the required distance to the destination.