Book Image

BeagleBone Robotic Projects

By : Richard Grimmett
Book Image

BeagleBone Robotic Projects

By: Richard Grimmett

Overview of this book

Thanks to new, inexpensive microcontrollers, robotics has become far more accessible than it was in the past. These microcontrollers provide a whole new set of capabilities to allow even the most inexperienced users to make amazingly complicated projects. Beaglebone is effectively a small, light, cheap computer in a similar vein to Raspberry Pi and Arduino. It has all of the extensibility of today's desktop machines, but without the bulk, expense, or noise. This project guide provides step-by-step instructions to allow anyone to use this new, low cost platform in some fascinating robotics projects. By the time you are finished, your projects will be able to see, speak, listen, detect their surroundings, and move in a variety of amazing ways. The book begins with unpacking and powering up the components.This will include guidance on what to purchase and how to connect it all successfully–and a primer on programming the BeagleBone Black. Chapter by chapter, we will add additional software functionality available from the open source community, including how to make the system see using a webcam, how to hear using a microphone, and how to speak using a speaker. We then add hardware to make your robots move–including wheeled and legged examples–as well as covering how to add sonar sensors to avoid or find objects, plus wireless control to make your robot truly autonomous. Adding GPS allows the robot to find itself. Finally the book covers how to integrate all of this functionality so that it can all work together, before developing the most impressive robotics projects: those that can sail, fly, and explore underwater.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
BeagleBone Robotic Projects
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using PocketSphinx to interpret your commands


Sound is cool, and speech is even cooler, but you also want to be able to communicate with your projects through voice commands. This section will show you how to add speech recognition to your robotic projects.

Prepare for lift off

Now that your project can speak, you want it to listen as well. This isn't nearly as simple as the speaking part, but thankfully you have some significant help from the development community. You are going to download a set of capabilities called PocketSphinx, which will allow your project to listen to your commands.

Engage thrusters

The first step is downloading the PocketSphinx capability. Unfortunately, this is not quite as user friendly as the eSpeak process, so follow along carefully.

Go to the Sphinx website, hosted by Carnegie Mellon University at http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/. This is an open source project that provides you with the speech recognition SW. With your smaller embedded system, you will be using...