PDA Application for the Robota Toy Robot

The PDA used in this application is the iPAQ 3850 pocket PC. It is provided with a StrongARM 32-bit RISC processor working at 260 MHz, eith 64Mb of RAM. It communicates with the robot via serial interface. A Flycam-CF camera is connected to the iPAQ via a Compact Flash Memory card slot, through the pocket PC expansion Pack.

CONVERSAY and ELAN software development kits (SDKs) provide speech recognition and speech synthesis of spoken English. Vision and speech processing are performed by the pocket PC.

The operating system (OS) and development tools used for our applications are Microsoft Pocket PC 2002, and embedded Visual C++. The SDKs used for speech recognition, speech synthesis and camera data acquisition are available only for PocketPC 2002 OS. Transition of our application to free OS such as Linux will be considered when more open source codes will be available for speech processing and camera data acquisition for PDAs.

Robota is a mini humanoid robot of 5 degrees of freedom. It is 45 cm high, for a weight of about 1500gr. It has five maxon-A DC motor with clutch to drive its two legs, two arms and head, 5 associated potentiometers, as well as 6 switches. Robota’s motors are driven by a PIC 16F84A microcontroller. The PocketPC interfaces the motor and sensor cards via RS232 serial connection. Motor and sensor cards are interfaced through SPI protocol.

The Robota project aims at developing an educational high-tech toy that exploits multi-modal means of human-robot interaction, such as speech and vision.

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