Tag Archives: robot

Robotic waiter learning to serve drinks

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/robotic-waiter-learning-to-serve-drinks/

The maker of this robotic waiter had almost all of the parts for this project just sat around collecting dust on a shelf. We’re delighted they decided to take the time to pick up the few extra bits they needed online, then take the extra hour (just an hour?!) to write a program in Python to get this robotic waiter up and running.

It’s learning! Bartending is hard

We are also thrilled to report (having spotted it in the reddit post we found this project on) that the maker had “so much fun picking up and sometimes crushing small things with this claw.” The line between serving drinks and wanting to crush things is thinner than you might imagine.

And in even better news, all the code you need to recreate this build is on GitHub.

Robo arm, HAT, and Raspberry Pi all together

Parts list

First successful straw-drop. Perfecto!

reddit comments bantz

One of our favourite things about finding Raspberry Pi-powered projects on reddit is the comments section. It’s (usually) the perfect mix of light adoration, constructive suggestions, and gateways to tangents we cannot ignore.

Like this one recalling the Rick and Morty sketch in which a cute tiny robot realises their sole purpose is to pass butter:

No swears in this scene! But it is an adult cartoon in general

And also this one pointing us to another robotic arm having a grand old time picking up a tiny ball, sending it down a tiny slide, and then doing it all over again. Because it’s important we know how to make our own fun:

We also greatly enjoyed the fact that the original maker couldn’t use the Rick and Morty “what is my purpose” line to share this project because they are such an uber fan that they already used it for a project they posted just the day before. This cute creation’s sole reason for existing is to hold an Apple pencil while looking fabulous. And we are HERE for it:

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Nandu’s lockdown Raspberry Pi robot project

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/nandus-lockdown-raspberry-pi-robot-project/

Nandu Vadakkath was inspired by a line-following robot built (literally) entirely from salvage materials that could wait patiently and purchase beer for its maker in Tamil Nadu, India. So he set about making his own, but with the goal of making it capable of slightly more sophisticated tasks.

“Robot, can you play a song?”

Hardware

Robot comes when called, and recognises you as its special human

Software

Nandu had ambitious plans for his robot: navigation, speech and listening, recognition, and much more were on the list of things he wanted it to do. And in order to make it do everything he wanted, he incorporated a lot of software, including:

Robot shares Nandu’s astrological chart
  • Python 3
  • virtualenv, a tool for creating isolating virtual Python environments
  • the OpenCV open source computer vision library
  • the spaCy open source natural language processing library
  • the TensorFlow open source machine learning platform
  • Haar cascade algorithms for object detection
  • A ResNet neural network with the COCO dataset for object detection
  • DeepSpeech, an open source speech-to-text engine
  • eSpeak NG, an open source speech synthesiser
  • The MySQL database service

So how did Nandu go about trying to make the robot do some of the things on his wishlist?

Context and intents engine

The engine uses spaCy to analyse sentences, classify all the elements it identifies, and store all this information in a MySQL database. When the robot encounters a sentence with a series of possible corresponding actions, it weighs them to see what the most likely context is, based on sentences it has previously encountered.

Getting to know you

The robot has been trained to follow Nandu around but it can get to know other people too. When it meets a new person, it takes a series of photos and processes them in the background, so it learns to remember them.

Nandu's home made robot
There she blows!

Speech

Nandu didn’t like the thought of a basic robotic voice, so he searched high and low until he came across the MBROLA UK English voice. Have a listen in the videos above!

Object and people detection

The robot has an excellent group photo function: it looks for a person, calculates the distance between the top of their head and the top of the frame, then tilts the camera until this distance is about 60 pixels. This is a lot more effort than some human photographers put into getting all of everyone’s heads into the frame.

Nandu has created a YouTube channel for his robot companion, so be sure to keep up with its progress!

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