Monday 26 January 2015

Voice Recognition

The last major piece missing from Robbie was voice recognition that worked using the kinect showed promise but never worked all that well and was a pain to set up. Today
i stumbled on a android app for voice recognition that connects to ROS it recognizes once or continuously work up to a meter from the phone, it recognizes the kids voice as well
the app is from JSK robotics  you need messages from here https://github.com/jsk-ros-pkg/jsk_common

Friday 16 January 2015

Autonomous robot


This we get from wikipedia
A fully autonomous robot can:
  • Gain information about the environment (Rule #1)
  • Work for an extended period without human intervention (Rule #2)
  • Move either all or part of itself throughout its operating environment without human assistance (Rule #3)
  • Avoid situations that are harmful to people, property, or itself unless those are part of its design specifications (Rule #4)
An autonomous robot may also learn or gain new knowledge like adjusting for new methods of accomplishing its tasks or adapting to changing surroundings.

I have been asked the question how autonomous is Robbie and do you let him move on this own?
While in principle he has all the systems, and has demonstrated that they work on there own and sometimes they all work together. The fact is in the last 2 years he has been tethered to the battery charger and partially disassembled. Stage 1 is now complete we have a working robot. What we don't have is trust in him and reliability. Stage 2 of this build is address those problems trust will come with reliability but autonomy needs more , below is a list of some tasks the robot should do

Self-maintenance

  • Charge the battery, this part works using a behaviour tree
  • monitor the systems to be part of the above

Sensing the environment

  • Is anyone near me, face recognition work but needs to be improved
  • where am I, while localisation will give a map reference we need a name ie lounge room
  • day and night shut down nodes that wont be used at night
  • short and long term memory

Task performance

  • Goto a place, did I achieve my goal?
  • get something, did I achieve my goal?
  • locate something, did I achieve my goal?

Indoor navigation

  • Localisation
  • update the known world what has changed
and we also need to log activity, success and failures to measure performance, in the lab he can go through a door with out touching but in real life? Same for localisation.
I'm sure this list will grow.