AUDIO ARM
April 2018 - May 2018
What is Audio Arm?
After laser-cutting the parts, collecting the servos, and assembling all of them around 2 o' clock in the morning, my robot arm was complete. It was fun to assemble and was amazing to look at. This robot represented both my interest in mechanical engineering and computer science, and was a good way to combine them. Sadly, there was no ideas that came to my mind at the time on what I projects I can do with it.
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Fortunately, after our class was assigned a final project for our Artificial and Natural Intelligence seminar, an idea came to me on how to expand the capabilities of my robot arm. Taking some inspiration from some friends at MakeHarvard, I decided to integrate speech recognition into the robot arm.
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Audio Arm setup
How does it Work?
Audio Arm listens to simple voice commands and outputs a movement. The processing is separated into two parts; the speech processing and servo movement. Utilizing the SpeechRecognition and Serialization Python libraries, I was able to process the user's voice command and send a signal to the Arduino. From there on, the Arduino takes the signal sent from the Python program and outputs the proper servo movement.
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Some of the voice commands it takes in are:
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Moving left - "left", "Obama", "liberal"
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Moving right - "right", "Trump", "conservative"
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Moving center - "center"
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It's somewhat political :P
Challenges/Future Updates
Right now, the project has been completed and submitted. However, there was some problems encountered:
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Communication between the Python program and Arduino was challenging and needed to be handled properly.
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Sending of signal and outputting movement was delayed, so real-time movement was not working well.
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I won't be immediately working on it, but in the future, I would like to integrate more machine intelligence to it, making it behave more intelligently and interestingly!