A Voice Command System for Autonomous Robots

摘要

How to promote students' interest is very important in undergraduate engineering education. One of the techniques for achieving this is to select appropriate projects and to integrate them with regular courses. In this paper, a voice recognition system for autonomous robots is proposed as a project to educate students about microprocessors efficiently. The proposed system consists of a microprocessor and a voice recognition processor that can recognize a limited number of voice patterns. The commands of autono- mous robots are classified and are organized such that one voice recognition processor can distinguish robot commands under each directory. Thus, the proposed system can distinguish more voice commands than one voice recognition processor can. A voice com- mand system for three autonomous robots is implemented with a microprocessor Intel 80C196KC and a voice recognition processor HM2007. The advantages in integrating this system with regular courses are also described. Due to the importance of microprocessors in many different industrial applications, the microprocessor course is essential in the undergraduate electrical engineering curri culum. Many techniques have been developed in order to educate students about microprocessors efficiently (1)-(8). Some techniques proposed that interesting projects be integrated with the con- ventional curriculum (4)-(8). It has been known that the inte- gration of projects with the lecture courses can enhance the learning and understanding by the students. Among these pro- jects, there are some projects that build intelligent systems (5)(6)(9)(10). Since students have seen human-like robots in science fiction movies, they have dreamed of making intelli- gent robots or intelligent systems. Therefore, the intelligent robots or the intelligent systems implemented by microproces- sors can stimulate students to be involved in microprocessors. A m icromouse in (5) is a computer controlled autonomous mobile robot that can find a predetermined destination when placed in an unknown maze. The micromouse competition has earned high marks on publicity and technology. But the mi- cromouse competition has to be conducted on a maze of un- reasonable specification (6). Since most of the testing of the micromouse requires the maze and it is almost impossible for students to test their vehicles at home, a vision -guided autonomous vehicle is proposed as an alternative of the mi- cromouse competition in (6). The track of a vision-guided autonomous vehicle can be easily constructed. Most of com- ponents are off-the-shelf products and the level of challenge on software can vary to suit the student. However, since image processing and control of the car are accomplished by a per- sonal computer, a vision-guided autonomous vehicle project is more appropriate in courses related to computer vision, artifi- cial intelligence, and fuzzy logic rather than those related to microprocessors. In the MIROSOT(Micro -Robot World Cup Soccer Tournament), intelligent autonomous robots compete with each other in the soccer game (10). The host computer processes vision data and gets the positions of the ball and robots. Each robot receives this position data from the host computer through RF communication. Depending on the sen- sor data of each robot and the vision data, each robot decides its own behavior to play the soccer game. MIROSOT is a fast growing new interdisciplinary field where people from diffe r- ent backgrounds such as sensor fusion, intelligent control, robotics, communication, image processing, mechatronics, computer technology, and artificial life are working together for the development of intelligent soccer robots. But the soc- cer robot system requires a color vision system that consists of a personal computer, a color camera, and a color vision board. The size of robots is limited to 7.5 cm x 7.5 cm x 7.5 cm and therefore the control board of robots has to consist of some PCBs with surface mounting d