Ted | Devpost

The building process of Ted
Ted Back
Ted mounted on the voice-controlled car
The car on its own
Controller setup
Ted surgery
Ye

Inspiration

Our biggest inspiration came from our grandparents, who often felt lonely and struggled to find help. Specifically, one of us have a grandpa with dementia. He lives alone and finds it hard to receive help since most of his relatives live far away and he has reduced motor skills. Knowing this, we were determined to create a product -- and a friend -- that would be able to help the elderly with their health while also being fun to be around! Ted makes this dream a reality, transforming lives and promoting better welfare.

What it does

Ted is able to...

be a little cutie pie
chat with speaker, reactive movements based on conversation (waves at you when greeting, idle bobbing)
read heart rate, determine health levels, provide help accordingly
Drives towards a person in need through using the RC car, utilizing object detection and speech recognition
dance to Michael Jackson

How we built it

popsicle sticks, cardboards, tons of hot glue etc.
sacrifice of my fingers
Play.HT and Claude 3.5 Sonnet
YOLOv8
AssemblyAI
Selenium
Arudino, servos, and many sound sensors to determine direction of speaker

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into during development was making sure every part was secure. With limited materials, we found that materials would often shift or move out of place after a few test runs, which was frustrating to keep fixing. However, instead of trying the same techniques again, we persevered by trying new methods of appliances, which eventually led a successful solution!

Having 2 speech-to-text models open at the same time showed some issue (and I still didn't fix it yet...). Creating reactive movements was difficult too but achieved it through the use of keywords and a long list of preset moves.