Robo Rev | Devpost

Inspiration

The inspiration for our project, Robo Rev, came from the desire to create a robotic companion that can interact with its environment and its human handlers. We wanted to create a robot that can perceive its surroundings using object detection and speech recognition, and respond to commands through its motor actions and speech output.

What it does

Our project, Robo Rev, is a robotic dog that can perceive objects using object detection machine learning and is able to perform voice recognition to allow it to take and execute commands. It can also converse with its owner.

How we built it

We built Robo Rev using a combination of hardware and software. On the hardware side, we used a microcontroller, motors, and a camera. On the software side, we used object detection and speech recognition algorithms to process the input from the camera and microphone. We also used a separate server to analyze the data and send commands to the robot.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we faced during the hackathon was with the hardware. We had issues with the wifi connection for the microcontroller and unfortunate hardware malfunctions. The raspberry pi 4b and camera with built-in wifi connection malfunctioned due to either manufacturing issues or incompatibility between the hardware. The cameras that we had available were also not functioning correctly and would not allow us to receive input and program it. We attempted a variety of combinations of electronic connections to achieve our goals but unfortunately, we could not get it to work the way we wished.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite the challenges we faced with the hardware, we are proud of the progress we made with the software. We were able to successfully implement object detection and speech recognition algorithms, and we were able to send commands to the robot and receive feedback from the server.

What we learned

We learned about the difficulties and complexities of building a robot that can interact and communicate with humans in a natural way. We also learned about the importance of testing and iterating on the design of a robot.

What's next for Robo Rev

In the future, we hope to improve the hardware and resolve the issues we encountered during the hackathon. We also plan to gather more data for the learning algorithm and continue to improve the robot's perception and response capabilities. We also plan to improve the robot's social skills and create a more realistic and interactive robot companion.