Sound Following Robot

Inspiration

We were bored and though about what would be cool to do.

What it does

The Sound Following Robot uses 3 microphones placed in a triangular position to locate the source of the sound and drive to it, the Robot was designed to follow high frequency noise.

How we built it

We use 2 DC motors placed in the middle of the base plate longitude wise and 2 ball casters at the front and back. The base plate was cut from plywood, the casters are held by zip ties while the DC motors are held by 3D printed mounts that snaps onto the board. On the Base board we have an Arduino Romeo for drive computation and sound analog input. To power the Arduino we have 3, 9 volts batteries in parallel. Next to the arduino board we have the bread board where we put the passive high pass filters to help the robot focus solely on high frequency noise. Finally we have 3 3D printed mounts to put the microphones in. These mounts are designed to divide the room in three to help the microphones find the source.

Challenges we ran into

We ran to many challenges. The first challenge we faced was inconsistent microphones. We noticed the back mic was faulty as well as other replacements. One challenge we faced was interpreting the data from the mics to understandable numbers we could process into orders for the DC motors. One major problem we faced was that the DC motors when running where creating vibrations big enough to fault the data received from the mics. To solve that we tried using foam supports to attenuate the unwanted vibration noise.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The robot works! We lost hope at one point but we finally managed to have a working robot!

What we learned

We learned a lot about sound sampling, processing and sound physics. Furthermore we learned about filters and Arduino sampling rates. Some team mates learned about 3D printing and Solidsworks design.