I know it might sound bizarre/awkward but I really need help on this.
I’ve been chosen randomly (with some other students) in my school for a robot creation project.
These are some information on what the robot should do:
Recognize students face, and bio-metric information (including their fingerprint)
Welcomes each student every morning at their arrival at school, in this format using speech {Good morning John, you arrived at school by 7:30 am, have a nice day)
Bade them goodbye at the end of the day
Records the time of arrival and exit of each student in a database
Should be able to recognize speeches that will be used for it’s navigation (Like, FOLLOW
ME for example to make it come with me somewhere and STOP to make it stop {NB: Only voices of some specific people allowed})
The physical part:
Aluminum or any better material
Robot in full human form
It should be able to walk and at least move by itself from the entrance to anywhere in the school
Solar inclined robot ( solar energy would be converted to electricity in addition to the normal rechargeable battery)
I would need a list of all the materials that would be needed for this project. We’ll use Rasberry Pi, I would also need to know the Raspberry Pi version that is suitable for the project.
you forgot to mention the max. budget you are allowed to spend. A walking robot alone might cost you a 6-digit number and the server mainframe to allow face recognition needs to be huge too.
Think of flocks of students storming into school all at once. How would a single RasPi be able to recognize and greet them all by name?
They all come with basecaps, or changed their hairdo. Not to mention wearing a Covid mask.
None of them will look like their stored sample-picture, which makes it very difficult to recognize them.
Maybe you can use the RasPI to stream the video to pentagon or equal department in your country and let them do the recognition part.
Developing it in a robotics school project is utopic…
Actually, we were told to do it in stages, the first stage is to do a full research on the materials that would be needed (A full list of all materials that would be needed for the completion of the project) including the total cost it would sum up to (no matter how much).
Then the school would plan how to take care of the cost.
@PrinceSpecial Welcome to the RobotShop Community. What level of education are you in? High school? University? Post-Grad?
Based on the features you list, it seems there are two main, somewhat separate parts to the project:
Programming / software:
Recognize students face, and bio-metric information (including their fingerprint)
Welcomes each student every morning at their arrival at school, in this format using speech {Good morning John, you arrived at school by 7:30 am, have a nice day)
Bade them goodbye at the end of the day
Records the time of arrival and exit of each student in a database
Should be able to recognize speeches
Humanoid:
“Full humanoid form”
Able to walk and at least move by itself from the entrance to anywhere in the school
The first part can be done using, as you said, a Pi 4, microphone, speaker and fingerprint scanne (less than $100 total).
The second part, if you want a humanoid of over 3’ tall which uses legs to actually walk, will be a project in and of itself, likely over $20k. For example NAO stands at 58cm:
The UXA-90 is 100cm:
They both walk incredibly slowly, need constant human support (in case they fall down etc.) and a ton of programming and sensor interfaces. If you’re looking to create your own and are not sure where to start nor how much it might cost, then know that this is a highly ambitious, expensive and difficult project where there are incredibly few such robots which have actually reached commercialization.
Right! Someone will have to peel off chewinggum from the fingerprint sensor regularly.
Because students, who visit a school that needs such high security level, won’t like to be registered and monitored.
There are no guides or tutorials (which I am aware of) for such a project - normally everything you describes is university level research with a team of graduate students. The only advice I can provide would be to scale back significantly. Most teachers at that level also don’t know / understand what’s involved in creating a complex robot.
Start with the programming part: that’s a pretty big (and difficult) project in and of itself, and doesn’t require a big budget. Simultaneously, start experimenting with a mobile base (not a humanoid) to have it move around so you can gain experience with mobile robotics.
Right!
Why fingerprint sensor AND face recognition? Is your school in *Guantanamo Bay *?
Also voice controlled movement will be difficult in a noisy area with echo, like a school entry hall.
If you want to play around with voice commands, I’ve seen an arduino shield for voice commands, but can’t find it back… @cbenson might have a link?
//edit its this one
This sounds a major undertaking for a High School project! You might find you need to compromise a bit with regards to financial constraints especially for the physical movements etc of the robot. The cost of servos alone will be eye watering. Have a look at open source projects on the web for an idea on where other people are up to with similar projects. What timeframe are you looking at for this project? Even places with huge budgets spend years working on projects of this magnitude.
Software wise there are open source platforms which can support things like face recognition to a certain degree (such as Open CV) which will run quite happily on a Raspberry Pi, but if you want the robot to successfully identify and respond to every student in a school you might find problems there. One Raspberry on its own may struggle to control all the aspects of a robot like this. If I were attacking this I would expect to combine the Pi with a combination of other micro controllers to control servos and sensors.
This is a massive project you are suggesting. On top of all the technical issues there will also be coordination issues (group projects always have coordination issues) and the whole process of decision making, delegation and communication will need to be worked out before you start.
It’s an ambitious goal. Best of luck with this or whatever project you decide to opt for.
