Welcome

This blog details my finding in building and setting up a small web connected humanoid robot.
The first objective of this project is to fully control and monitor the robot from internet.
This will be done by adding a single board computer running a full Linux system connected to the Robovie Nano robot by the serial port and connected to the web by wifi.
Beside web remote control, I will take advantage of the complete Linux system to add some higher functions to this robot (environment analysis, navigation, speech & video recognition,...).

There are several constraints in this project.

At first a limited weight and space . The Nano is a very small robot and the available space is quite narrow (6 x 3 x 2 cm in the back) .
The added weight load must be under 100 gms (Linux board + battery + wlan+ audio + webcam + sensors ) if we want to keep fluid motions and good autonomy.
Due to theses constraints I have to work with a minimal processing power. I am using a Bifferboard from Bifferos running a full Debian Distro at 150Mhz.

The tasks and progress are:

Build Debian kernel & rootf : (done) Debian Squeeze with headers. Linux 2.6.32.2
Wlan (done)
Remote motions control (done)
Remote master slave control : (done)
Video streaming - 2 ways : (done)
Vision/Blob recognitions (not started)
Sound streaming - 2 ways (wip) - can play stream, can record sound
Speech Synthesis (done) - flite working well, espeak is choppy but still usable
Speech Recognition (wip)
Remote Sensors monitoring (done) Battery level, accelerometer, distance, temperature
Lcd usb display (done) - hacked 1.5" key chain
Oled i2c display (wip)
Auto charging (not started)

Saturday, February 26, 2011

SPEECH & MUSIC

A USB sound adapter with the chipset CM119 give much better result than the cheap one I firstly used (with chipset 6911).
I can now play sound (small .mp3, .wav or text to speech with Flite) simultaneously with the webcam streaming and doesn’t experience anymore sound quality issues.

It  can also play web streaming radio with the command:
wget -O - http:/ip address :port number | madplay - -m -o wave:- | aplay



The "Music Fairy" pictured has the smallest pcb. I added 2 x 0.25 W speakers in the Nano hands.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)