4 ms·

My daughter, a 6th grader, wants to create a robot that can take voice input and act on it. I think this could be a great place to start.

83457 10y ago
In intro to comp sci we had an open project using an irobot bot (roomba without vaccum) so my group of some of the more experienced students pieced together a robot dog using a laptop and xbox kinect on top. You could say commands and it would obey such as sit (moves back and stops), rollover (spins), bark (sound from speakers), etc. It would also track a primary user and if you said follow it would stay a certain distance near you and follow. This functionality was "easy" with the kinect sdk capabilities as it was just a matter of connecting events from kinect code to commands to send to the robot. If given more time we could have done stuff like hand movements or throwing motions with the kinect skeletal tracking and vectors.
- david927 10y ago
  That sounds great! You should post a video of it. Personally, I was thinking of something cheaper, such as a Raspberry Pi with a stepper motor.
  - 83457 10y ago
    unfortunately I didn't get video (as silly as that sounds) and the person who did never sent to me I even put my son's furry dog halloween costume on it :)
madeofpalk 10y ago
It's bonkers to believe that this is actually possible for a 6th grader (with maybe a little bit of help) now. Just over 10 years ago when I was a 6th grader I wanted to do this, but I was out of luck. There were barely any products out that had 'conversational interfaces', let alone the commoditisation to enable just about anyone to do it as a hobby.
- flukus 10y ago
  I think all the tools were there (though not necessarily the compute power). What was missing for me (20 years ago) was the guidance to find these sorts of possibilities. Parents and teachers were no help and there was no google to find the right geocities pages. I wish I'd known about linux and all the free oss tools much earlier.

83457 10y ago

In intro to comp sci we had an open project using an irobot bot (roomba without vaccum) so my group of some of the more experienced students pieced together a robot dog using a laptop and xbox kinect on top. You could say commands and it would obey such as sit (moves back and stops), rollover (spins), bark (sound from speakers), etc. It would also track a primary user and if you said follow it would stay a certain distance near you and follow. This functionality was "easy" with the kinect sdk capabilities as it was just a matter of connecting events from kinect code to commands to send to the robot. If given more time we could have done stuff like hand movements or throwing motions with the kinect skeletal tracking and vectors.

david927 10y ago
That sounds great! You should post a video of it. Personally, I was thinking of something cheaper, such as a Raspberry Pi with a stepper motor.
- 83457 10y ago
  unfortunately I didn't get video (as silly as that sounds) and the person who did never sent to me I even put my son's furry dog halloween costume on it :)

madeofpalk 10y ago

It's bonkers to believe that this is actually possible for a 6th grader (with maybe a little bit of help) now. Just over 10 years ago when I was a 6th grader I wanted to do this, but I was out of luck. There were barely any products out that had 'conversational interfaces', let alone the commoditisation to enable just about anyone to do it as a hobby.

flukus 10y ago
I think all the tools were there (though not necessarily the compute power). What was missing for me (20 years ago) was the guidance to find these sorts of possibilities. Parents and teachers were no help and there was no google to find the right geocities pages. I wish I'd known about linux and all the free oss tools much earlier.