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

[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).

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

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.

Why buy one new from Maplin

[Neil_Brown]

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

Re:One Trick Pony.

[boristdog]

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