Wassim Tawil
TAs: William Dubel
Steven Pickles
Instructors: A. A Arroyo
E. M. Schwartz
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
EEL 5666
Intelligent Machines Design Laboratory
Robot Proposal
My general robot idea is one that acts like a spy. I think that could have many applications in the real world such as the army for example, where it can be used to eavesdrop on some enemies or map an unknown area. It can have many other applications and it offers endless possibilities to customize it for a specific task. The main reason why I’m building such a robot though is because it interests me. I’ve always been fascinated with spy toys, and gadgets, and any kind of stealth vehicle. Since we only get ten weeks to build this robot, I’m not going to try to make it extra fancy; I want something simple yet intriguing. Also, since I’m limited to the materials and supplies I can use ($$$), my spy robot will probably turn out bulky for a stealth machine. Regardless of these conditions, I’m still going to enjoy fabricating this project as it will be a very rewarding and challenging experience.
This
proposal will give an idea of what my robot will perform. It’s based on all the
research I’ve been doing on different sensors and robotic components and is not
final. I will probably end up changing or adding some things to it, and I’m
definitely open to ideas and suggestions. The board I will be using is the Mavric-IIB which came highly recommended. For the collision
avoidance behavior, I will use bump switches and IR detectors. The model IR I
have in mind is the Sharp GP2D12. My robot will have two wheels and probably a
tail dragger to be used as a third wheel. I will have two independent DC
motors, one for each wheel, as well as a motor driver to control them. Since
I’m going to have several devices on my platform, I will need motors with a
good amount of torque. The main feature of my robot is that it will have a
speech recognition system. I’ve searched on the internet for a kit that will
perform this function and I have found one which will hopefully do the job.
It’s called the SR-07 Speech Recognition Kit and it’s from imagesco.com. It can
be easily interfaced to my controller and can be programmed with 40 words. It
has many other functions too. Since I’m trying to build a spy robot, I need to
be able to control it from distances where the speech recognition will not work
too well. In this case, I decided to use a wireless microphone which will probably
come with a transmitter and receiver. I will attach the receiver to the robot,
and that way my voice commands can be directly transmitted to it. I will also
attach a small speaker to the receiver to output the sound. I’m really hoping
this will work. Another feature that I want to add is vision. If I want my
robot to function in places where I can’t see it, as in a different room, it
must provide me with some feedback. For that, I will place a wireless camera on
it, from x10.com, which will send live video and audio to my laptop. This will
give me much better control of my robot. At this point, I’m getting hesitant
because I’m not sure if my robot satisfies the requirements for this class. I
feel that I need to add more to it. So, I will try to figure out another
feature that would fit my spy robot and make use of its vision and speech
recognition. I will discuss this more in depth with Dr Schwartz and the TAs and
maybe one of them can help me with an idea.