Companion Robots for the Elderly
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Establish a companion robot on Python and Raspberry Pi.
Background
Aging has grown to be a social problem in China. Survey shows that nearly 50% of the elderly believe that the lack of children’s companion is the biggest problem in elderly care. On the other hand, for those young people, living habits, age differences, work pressure and other resons decline their opportunities to communicate with their parents.
iFamily is an emotional companion robot for the elderly. To improve its connectivity with the elderly emotionally, we conceive an idea of designing a personalized outlook which resembles the elderly’s family. Here in our prototype, we manager to 3D print a cartoon outlook to represent our idea.
Overall establishment
Our robot is bulit with Raspberry Pi and peripherals covered by 3D printed shell. We use Python to implement functions such as speech interactions and video calls. Here I’ll breifly introduce every section and its implementation:
Hardware
- 3D printed shell
- Raspberry Pi 3B+ + Linux / NOOBS + SD card 32G
- 3.5 inch LCD
- Caremer
- Mobile speaker + recorder
- Actuator
- External power supply
Speech interaction with people
Just as the common companion robots, iFamily can have normal communication with people with cute postures. They also have their personalized corpus in order to mimic the one they represent. This function is implemented on Python based on the following packages and processing procedure:
- Package: PyAudio: recording & voice activity detection(VAD) & voice playback
- Package: RPi.GPIO: actions implementation
- Baidu API: automatic speech recognition(ASR) & text-to-speech(TTS)
- Turling API: natural language generation(NLG)
Speech interaction with robots
One is not enough! Since each iFamily has their own symbol, why not let them chat with each other and reproduce those interesting scenes?
We use socket to implement speech transimission between robots for scene reproduction. Once the elderly are recalling something interesting that has been recorded in these robots, they would automatically play a small theater in front of the elderly!
Video call
iFamily provides video call via webbrowser. However, since it is already very convenient to have video call via multiple social media, we plan to modify this function on iFamily to a safety mornitor, which means, when the elderly are experiencing any emergency, the real-time mornitering can be transmitted into the children’s mobile phone after they press an emergency button.
Brochure
I designed a brochure for iFamily. Wish everyone repects their parents and wish all the old people be happy and healthy.
