Robotic Arm With Home-Brewed, Open Source Voice Control

First time accepted submitter aonsquared writes "A couple of months ago I managed to scoop up a cheap (£30) robot arm with a USB interface from Maplin (I'm in the UK). Following a wrist injury which left me without the use of my right hand for 4 weeks, I decided to build it for a little hacking project. Using Linux, libusb and other freely available tools, I have enabled the robot arm to respond to my voice commands. I've posted a full tutorial and downloadable source code, as well as a demonstration video. Hopefully, open-source voice recognition as well as devices like the Kinect (which has spawned hundreds of different cool hacks) can someday revolutionise the way we interact with computers and machines."

Comments

Open source is great for small projects

[h00manist]

Would be cool is someone came up with more ways to help bigger projects continue and conclude. Lots of help for developers, I guess. Reduce disagreements, forking, incompatibilities for no good reason, some economic engineering, better developer tools, libraries, etc.

Re:Open source is great for small projects

[Anonymous Coward]

Pfft, what's with you communists looking at the bigger picture! The programmers ego is more interested in putting "lead developer" on their CV.

Re:Open source is great for small projects

[Anrego]

Anyone who has every worked with people who arn't getting paid (doesn't just apply to open source, but to community volunteering and other such stuff as well) knows these problems well.

If people are not getting anything back besides good feelings from their work.. it takes a lot of diplomacy sometimes to keep everyone working together while still staying focuses on what you are trying to do.

Open source is especially hard, because as we know, as programmers we tend to have very extreme and differing opinions. You can't make everyone happy, at the end of the day you have to pick a direction and everyone has to go with it. Failure to do so is why we have the kind of excessive forking and massive feature bloat.

The only successful way I've seen is to have people who are devoted enough to the end goal to let the occasional thing slide. "ok fine, we'll do it that way and I'll get behind it, because seeing this thing finished is more important than using my prefered approach". In other words, you need someone who gets people excited about what they are working on. In other words, you need the geek equivilant of motivational speakers. These people are rare (and I'm definitely not one).

Re:Open source is great for small projects

[h00manist]

It all boils down to one thing - developer support. Open source needs more coordinated developer support, in many forms. Google Summer of Code was a great idea. Crowdfunding, Kickstarter, etc, Humble Bundle, bounties, etc, are helping find a financial model, which I have great hope for - money is an important recognition too. Being able to put it on resumes, getting proper recognition for quality work, could apparently be better, but already works. What I don't see happening too well is mediation to resolve conflicts, which end up getting in the way too often, and some efforts to increase compatibility, improve tools, etc. The best way to increase compatibility, it seems, is really just reaching agreements on open standards. Many proposals and discussions on creating open standards for things is the only way everyone will try to make things according to some common design. The telecom and IT industry are full of examples of how common standards made things work better for everyone.

Mmm... Beer...

[Elyas]

I read robot and home brewed and hoped someone had invented their own personal home brewing robot. Oh well, the dream lives on

an entire voice-controlled robot, open sourced

[societyofrobots]

I've also done an entire robot voice controlled, with wheels and two arms, and all the hardware and software are open source (done to the smallest detail, and easy to understand).

the video can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=nEOwTzV8qak

all the documentation can be found here:
http://www.societyofrobots.com/robot_ERP.shtml

One Trick Pony.

[Anonymous Coward]

And the only command it currently obeys is "spank the monkey"

Re:One Trick Pony.

[boristdog]

Well, if you want to make money off your invention, this is the fastest way to do it.

More advanced compound commands

[leonem]

It would be nice to see this combined with something like Apple's new voice interface (I'm sure there are other equivalents) to parse a more complex grammar.

Even something like "left" vs "left a bit" vs "left a lot" would be enough to make this a more natural interface.

Great stuff though, nonetheless. I remember ten years ago when I was at Cambridge the engineers having a competition to build robotic arms to pick up screws, half of them couldn't get it to work, and that was in a reproducible situation, no controls, as many attempts as needed etc.

Re:More advanced compound commands

[Anonymous Coward]

> Even something like "left" vs "left a bit" vs "left a lot" would be enough to make this a more natural interface.

Possibly even "throw the harpoon." People are going to come from all over... this boy's an Eskimo!

Why buy one new from Maplin

[Neil_Brown]

... when you could just buy one second hand?

Re:Why buy one new from Maplin

[monkeyhybrid]

Well it didn't cost him an arm and a leg for a brand new one.

Technicality?

[Jaqenn]

If the robot arm seizes you by the throat, and you're unable to vocalize the words 'stop choking me!', does it still count as disobeying you?

Re:Technicality?

[Anonymous Coward]

Robot arms need a safe-word indeed, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-VJLz65QhM

Now stroke it slowly...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Mmmm, that feels good... now a little faster... a little faster..."

Re:Mmm... Beer...

[Anonymous Coward]

I read robot and home brewed and hoped someone had invented their own personal home brewing robot. Oh well, the dream lives on

Does this count?

http://www.asciimation.co.nz/bender/index.html

Robot arms are a cool project.

[meburke]

Sound control! Good on ya!

Just recently I've been trying to do more work with robot arms and vision (as opposed to movement and balance), and I'm looking for good projects to copy and learn from. This is pretty cool.

Anybody remember a link to a project for a robot-arm shooter that was mentioned on /. a few years ago?
Anyone have any links to some other good projects?
Anyone have any good links to robotic cranes with arms?

Thanks.

Or by programming error:

[MrHanky]

User: Careful, robotic arm, don't strangle me!
Robotic Arm: SYNTAX ERROR ON WORD 4: UNESCAPED APOSTROPHE FOUND. PROCEEDING EXECUTING COMMAND!
User: I said DON'T strangle me, don [carrier lost]
Robotic Arm: SYNTAX ERROR ON WORD 3: ...

Remember with open source: release early, release often.

Wrist injury... chortle chortle.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Following a suspicious wrist injury (cough).... left my without the use of my right hand (cough).... voice recognition includes 'faster' and 'harder'..... :) Ha ha ha!

Yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, you're gonna want to do some practice runs on a hot dog first.

Power Word

[TitusC3v5]

I know a few voice activated commands that are probably missing.

Home building robot

[h00manist]

And I thought you were talking about a home building robot. Which I think could be done, with some robots working with compressed earth and forms. Compressed earth is amazingly solid, and easily made from regular soil and water, it's just a whole lot of manual labor.

Thought of a different article

[Anonymous Coward]

When I saw the title I was hoping to read about someone who built a robot in his basement to automatically do some home brewed beer. Then, when your friends are over it would dispense perfectly poured pints.

Re:Mmm... Beer...

[SleazyRidr]

Looks like your mind went to a lot nicer place than a lot of the posters who came later than you. I'd much prefer a robot to brew my beer than do the other thing.

Cool but a remote would be more effective

[Hentes]

This video demonstrates why people use remotes instead of voice control. Might be useful for disabled people though.

hey!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Why are you hitting yourself? Stop hitting yourself!"

Big Bang Theory?

[MrQuacker]

Wasn't this the entire premise behind an episode of The Big Bang Theory?

So when you "interact" with the robot hand, be sure to program in a command to "release gripper"

Open source is great for *large* projects

[ron_ivi]

Open source is great for small projects

Really? Small projects often struggle to get the momentum in a community for open source to start showing benefits.

IMHO, in contrast it's large projects (OS's, database technologies (both sql and non-traditional), compiler chains, Gnu CoreUtils) that benefit most from F/OSS -- since those are the ones with enough components that need to bring to getter skills from across industries to benefit from large distributed groups of contributors.

TL/DR: Open Source is great for *large* projects.

Hmm... What would I try...

[Anonymous Coward]

Up.....Down.......Up.......Down......Up....Down..UP..DOWN..UP.DOWN!!!

Re:Mmm... Beer...

[Anonymous Coward]

Brewing?
That beats one that'd make you go blind if you use it too much...

Who does open source work for?

[h00manist]

IMHO, in contrast it's large projects (OS's, database technologies (both sql and non-traditional), compiler chains, Gnu CoreUtils) that benefit most from F/OSS

You only gave examples of projects that are of interest to the programmers themselves. Products for themselves.

Patent Application

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.google.com/patents?printsec=description&zoom=4&id=84vwAAAAEBAJ&output=text&pg=PA6