When we saw what Amazon did with Alexa and what Google did with home, we were sure that the age of computerized personal assistants was here. However, we wondered how to make them more human – Aya is a proof of concept for robotic personal assistants that look and feel human.
What it does
Aya is an interactive robot that stores your picture to recognize you and to tell you what object you are holding.
How we built it
Aya is an embedded systems nightmare! A servo systems interface with audio codecs being run on different threads for multiprocessing.
We 3D printed the physical parts (courtesy of InMoov®, an open source robot) in a process that spanned over 26 hours. It was built and assembled at Hack the North 2017.
Aya uses AWS Rekognition to compare face geometries to recognize people she has already met, and to meet new humans. We choose the highest confidence object that is not human, and run that through Amazon Polly, which generates an.ogg file. While all this is happening, another thread with custom servo controls is running in parallel to make the jaw move with speech.
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