I would like to select components that I can use in robot projects that will enable text-to-voice synthesis (or perhaps, more simply, output of recorded voice tracks) and audio output. Input voice recognition would also be a desirable feature. My main interest is a robot project created by blind students for blind people, but, obviously, such features are also of very general interest. I’m a robotics educator in West Africa and I’m working with various robotics kits including REV, VEX and makeBot and diy based on Arduino. This is an area where I don’'t have experience so suggestions would really help and especially specific parts suggestions as I would like to order components very soon.
Along the same lines, I’m also interested in hooking up a camera to run an image recognition system. I have experience in using neural nets for object recognition but I’ve never hooked up such a system or attached one to a robot. The mechanical details are more difficult for me than the science of object recognition.
For voice recognition, we do have a few options you may be interested in. You can view these here. If you want to use speech recognition on Arduino, you may be interested in RB-Tig-09, which includes both the hardware and also the custom software for advanced features.
If your camera is light-weight enough, you could simply attach it with double-sided tape to a bracket. This bracket can then be attached to your robot frame using mounting equipment (screws, bolts & nuts, even double-sided tape). For example, in this blog article, I attached the sensor to an L-bracket using double-sided tape (image here). It was both fast and very convenient.
You can find plenty of hardware to attach parts under Mechanics. If you have more details about how you intend to attach the camera and to what you will attach it to (maybe links or pictures?), then we may be able to provide better recommendations for specific hardware that would be compatible with your camera/use case.
Another thing you may want to do is place your camera in a pan & tilt system. This would allow you to change where the camera is looking. While not required in all robotic designs, there are plenty of cases where this is helpful.
You can see our pan & tilt systems here: direct drive, gear box.
