Why don’t toddlers drive automobiles? It’s possible you’ll suppose it’s as a result of they lack the dexterity and psychological capabilities. However for those who ask Robotcus, the reply is rather more pragmatic: they will’t attain the pedals. In principle, a small youngster might drive a automotive in the event that they weren’t restricted by their small stature. To resolve that drawback, Robotcus determined to create a voice-controlled driving system. However his finances was too restricted for a full-size automobile, so he began on a small scale by constructing this voice-controlled robotic automotive.
On a mechanical degree, this can be a fairly easy rover robotic just like an RC automotive. It borrows a lot of its components from Robotcus’s earlier Mini Flipper Battlebot challenge. It has six wheels and the unique implementation had every of the 4 again wheels pushed by an electrical motor, with the entrance two wheels spinning freely. Later, Robotcus discovered that his battery couldn’t provide sufficient present to drive 4 motors and so he switched to solely two pushed wheels. Robotcus additionally retained the battlebot’s servo-actuated flipper mechanism within the entrance. We suppose that may let kids observe their highway rage.
The management technique is the place this will get attention-grabbing. A Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W single-board pc (later changed by a Raspberry Pi 4 Mannequin B) controls the electrical motors via a twin H-bridge driver, so this has differential steering. It decides what to do based mostly on voice instructions obtained via a wi-fi USB microphone. Robotcus experimented with an onboard USB microphone, however discovered that it wasn’t in a position to register voice instructions reliably.
The Raspberry Pi is ready to acknowledge voice instructions utilizing Google’s cloud speech recognition service. It was essential to go to the cloud as a result of a lighter, native speech recognition library took too lengthy (15+ seconds) to return a end result. Even with the time spent sending information forwards and backwards to the cloud, Google’s service was in a position to do the identical factor in only a few seconds. A Python script seems for the acknowledged command after which controls the motors accordingly.
It will probably drive ahead till instructed in any other case, cease, elevate the flipper, spin left, spin proper, drive slowly, and even dance. We aren’t certain if this might assist a toddler navigate metropolis streets or not, however they may actually management a automotive utilizing this technique. Subsequent, Robotcus plans to construct a model that accomplishes the identical factor with signal language instructions.