Robotic interviews
11 January 2010
LPRS’ easy-Radio wireless modules bring robotic TV presenter to life.
Most humanoid robots are not usually capable of walking far over uneven surfaces, so an armchair-style chariot transports the humanoid. From that, the robot can jump out and perform before climbing back onto the chariot and continuing onwards. The resulting robot was heavily customised and programmed with motions, dance routines, handshakes and gestures. A camera was mounted into its head to give a direct feed of the interview in progress.
The chariot uses a four-wheel drive robot platform with a customised shell to make it resemble an armchair. Another camera is mounted on it so the chariot can back off from the humanoid and record interviews from a second viewpoint.
The biggest design issue was the audio interaction between the robot and the interviewee. A method was required to remotely play back over 200 words and phrases accurately and quickly to make the interviews run smoothly. Nothing existed off the shelf, so a custom design was required that employed an MP3 playback unit, amplifier and speaker located in the chariot that would produce the humanoids voice. The unit was operated from an RS232 input stream and a method of accessing all the words and phrases using a remote control was required.
A USB keyboard was modified to output the required instruction data stream and a reliable method of transmitting the data over RF to the receiver in the chariot was required. Many days were spent testing a number of RF modules from various companies but they were all plagued with interference problems, poor range or complex data stream encoding issues. So the solution came from LPRS easy-Radio modules.
Typical applications for LPRS’ wireless modules include industrial monitoring and control systems, alarm and security systems and communications systems.
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