Future Project Ideas Extensions

Edwin as a platform has a lot of capability and opportunity for future addition. Many of the capabilities created previously can be extended or made more robust, new projects can be implemented, and many other things. The following is a list of possible ideas for future generations of researchers:

Brain

• General increase in use learning algorithms
• Create "personalities" that influence motion speed, gestures, and speech pitch
• Create "emotion" node that simulations emotion to influence motion, gestures, and speech pitch
• Implement OAK infrastructure

Motion

• Optimize head motors to make drawing shapes better
• Grip different sized objects intuitively
• Integrate LIDAR data to allow UR5 arm to avoid objects
• Implement IK calculations for the head on UR5

Visual

• Make handwriting recognition more robust
  • Explore different classification algorithms beyond SVMS, like K-Nearest-Neighbors and/or Neural Nets
• Make handwriting recognition able to read text upside down and at angles
• Make Edwin able to pick out a piece of paper out of an image, then read the text on the paper
• Make Edwin able to read his own handwriting

Sound

• Smooth out text-to-speech node so Edwin doesn't sound as robotic
• Instead of TTS, create a soundboard for Edwin so he beeps and creates sounds like R2D2
  • Extension of soundboard is to create sound generation file to create the beeps generatively
• Use a better STT library to increase recognition accuracy
  • Look at Google STT API
  • Optimize Sphinx through recognition training
• Create an "edwin_translate" node that will transform sound into a series of beeps