CASAROBA

Designed and built an autonomous robot named Casaroba, a pun on Casanova. Casaroba’s objective is to locate a person, use his speaking ability to charm the person and obtain a phone number. The behaviors that Casaroba exhibited included object avoidance, human detection, speaking, listening, number acquisition, and distance mapping. Hardware included a MAVRIC-IIB microcontroller, a pyro-electric sensor, sonar, 12vdc 50:1T gear head motors, a text to voice chip outputted to an amplifier, an HMM speech recognition chip, a keypad and a LCD.  Software was coded in C++ and assembled through AVR. PCB boards were designed and milled with Protel. 

VOICE RECOGNITION

During my graduate work at the University of Florida I studied artificial intelligence with a concentration in pattern recognition as it applies to voice. I used the hidden Markov model to design the chip I implemented in the Casaroba project. 

Here is an oversimplified description of how I applied HMMs to voice recognition:

 Hidden Markov models (or HMMs) are statistical models that output a sequence of symbols or quantities which are conditional on the present state of the model and have unobserved (hidden) states. 

 HMMs are useful in speech recognition because a speech signal can be viewed as a small stationary signal. As the individual speaks, each signal is recorded and registered as a specific phoneme. These phonemes combine to create words via the trained probability system (the HMM). A more complex sequence (i.e. a sentence) is obtained through concatenating the individual HMMs. Because there are finite phonemes for any given language this is a computationally simple (though not trivial) approach to voice recognition. 

DARPA

Created printed circuit boards (PCBs) to be fabricated for the remote kill switch that is part of the DARPA Grand Challenge design. The main components of the design are a Rabbitcore processor and a 900 MHz Aerocomm radio for communications. Designed the proper boards, footprints, and specifications to allow for easily mountable and accessible electronics.

The 2005 Darpa Grand Challenge was for an autonomous vehicles to navigate 132 miles of desert road without the contact of any humans once the race started. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge_(2005)

http://news.ufl.edu/2005/10/10/race-outcome/