Sensors For Mobile Robots -— Part 4
FIGURE 7. An illustration of the rock-paper-scissors
robot's operation.
Oku Lab researchers at the University of Tokyo, a high
speed overhead camera (shown in Figure 7) controls the
mechanical hand that is interconnected through a
computer. The camera reads the human’s hand movements
in one millisecond and quickly responds with the solution
that is fed to the mechanical hand. As the lab personnel
say, “In other words, the robot is capable of cheating
faster than a human is capable of seeing.”
Smartphone Voice
Recognition Apps
With very little new speech recognition hardware being
developed during the 2008-2012 time period, smartphone
apps took center stage. For example, Siri is an app that
seemed to take the technical world by storm in 2011.
Shown in Figure 8 as an ad, it is much more advanced
than crude programs like ELIZA. Siri was part of Apple’s
marketing and is a popular app for all iPhones.
It has been said that “This was more than enough to
rejuvenate the speech recognition industry, while putting
the pressure back on to create better iterations of speech
recognition software.”
Google’s Voice Search app became available for the
iPhone in 2008. This app relies on Google’s cloud data
center to process voice requests, matching them with the
huge pool of human-speech samples and search queries
collected by Google. Their newer Android has a similar
program called ‘the Assistant’ that is supposed to be
pushed big time in the fourth quarter of 2012.
The Leap Motion Sensor that
Recognizes Human Hand Gestures
The little object that looks like a small candy bar in
front of the laptop computer in Figure 9 is actually a
motion sensor for computers that is reportedly going to
cost only $70. It is called the Leap and is made by Leap
FIGURE 8. The popular Siri smartphone app.
Motion — a small San Francisco company founded by
Michael Buckwald and David Holz. As they state, “Leap
represents an entirely new way to interact with your
computers. It’s more accurate than a mouse, as reliable as a
keyboard, and more sensitive than a touch screen. For the
first time, you can control a computer in three dimensions
with your natural hand and finger movements. This isn’t a
game system that roughly maps your hand movements. The
Leap technology is 200 times more accurate than anything
else on the market — at any price point. Just about the size
of a flash drive, the Leap can distinguish your individual
fingers and track your movements down to 1/100th of a
millimeter.”
This unique device caught my eye as the ideal sensor
for a small robot since it is a close-up gesture sensor unlike
the game-type Kinects by Microsoft with a minimum 40 cm
range. The extreme accuracy has been the fodder of many
online sites such as
extremetech.com, and people have
assumed that it uses time-of-flight technology that
measures the time it takes light to travel to and from an
object. The present models shown here and on different
sites are just mockups and not actual working prototypes,
so the technology is ripe for all types of robot applications.
It’s due out the end of this year or January 2013.
FIGURE 9. The Leap motion control for computers.
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