Servo - March 2014

This series has asserted that the new Windows 8 tablet computers — with all their power and integrated sensory capability — deserve to be considered as a robot controller for your next project. In the previous installments, we have shown how a tablet’s sensor data can be accessed by almost any programming language, and several examples of how that data can be used to control a robot’s behavior.

This month, we will conclude the series by demonstrating another advantage of using a full-blown computer to control your robot. Imagine the man-machine interface that voice recognition and text-to-speech can add to your projects. Consider how your robot’s personality might be augmented by the simple graphics shown in Figure 1.

Microsoft has endowed Windows with a very high quality text-to-speech capability but, unfortunately, its use by most users is restricted to letting the Narrator read documents to you, or to utilities that say whatever you type. For robotic applications, we need an easy way for programs to ask Windows to say string data, so we added this feature to our Sensor Utility (see Part 1 of this series for more details on the Sensor Utility).

Figure 2 shows a RobotBASIC program that demonstrates how to utilize our utility’s text-to-speech capability. The main routine (as shown) will say the string stored in the variable Expr without any graphics. If you uncomment the line initializing the animation and substitute 55 (or any nonzero value), then the face shown in the close-up in Figure 3 will be drawn, and the mouth will move in sync with the words being spoken. Before we get into the details of the animation, let’s look at the Say function (also in Figure 2).

The Say function begins by prefixing the string to be spoken with the command Say, followed by a comma, then

Last month, we demonstrated how GPS coordinates, camera images, and compass headings could be used by a robot to navigate to a previously designated object. This month, we will try to bestow some personality on the robot by giving it the ability to communicate verbally with a user.

Windows 8 Tablets

By John Blankenship and Samuel Mishal Post comments on this article and find any associated files and/or downloads at www.servomagazine.com/index.php/magazine/ article/march2014_Blankenship.