Though we worked hard we were unable to create a final product -- We got speech recognition complete and the robot is mobile and functional, but the link between the two, the Raspberry Pi, was not cooperating at all, for some reason.
Inspiration
We didn't choose to build to this, we ended up with this idea. Although, we attempted many different ideas on Friday night but ran into a lot of errors due to lack of skill and hardware available to us. Our group consists of two software people and two hardware-inclined people so we were sure that we were going to do an IoT type project so that everyone could contribute and learn at the same time. That is how we ended up building Rollout.
What it does
This robot takes in voice control through the Raspberry Pi to command the robot. Commands include: "startup", "right", "left", "forward", "backward", "dance", "stop", and "quit." The robot does the complementary movement.
How we built it
We used a Raspberry - Pi to process Google Cloud Speech Recognition API through an aux input from a phone. The information is then processed and sent to the Arduino through serial communication. The Arduino then executes the appropriate command. The software people are familiar with python so they did the research and coding of the voice recognition component while the hardware people focused on setting up the Raspberry Pi, buliding the robot, and coding the Arduino. For the robot base, we rebuilt one of our team member's robots from CPE 123 and.
Challenges we ran into
*Raspberry Pi * The biggest challenge was that none of us had ever worked with a Raspberry Pi before. It took us the entirety of Friday night to find all the adapters and components we needed to get the Pi to work. Our friend, in an attempt to help us connect to Secure Mustang Wireless messed with the wifi component of the Pi making our project impossible. It took us until Saturday night to fix this issue and connect to a Personal Hotspot.
Software v. Hardware At the beginning the software people thought the Aruino sensors and motors we had would be directly compatible with Pis because they didn't know about digital verses analog input. The hardware people assumed that connecting with Google's API would be much more difficult than it actually was. We were able to communicate with each other and talk through how ideas would or wouldn't work with each side of the electrical spectrum and created Rollout.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Connecting the Pi to Internet was definitely the turning point for our project since we were able to succeed in using a technology that we had never encountered before. When the page loaded for our Google Search of "hi", we were ecstatic.
What we learned
We learned that there's a big knowledge gap between software and hardware. The software people learned about Arduinos, analog input, and APIs in Python. The hardware people worked a lot more with the Pis and can set them up as well as work in their terminal.
What's next for Rollout
Probably destruction.
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