Smart phone tilt and voice controlled personal robotic assistant

Personal robotic assistants (PRA) can help reducing the manual human efforts. Ease of their control and operation may help their effective utilization. In this paper, the prototype of a smart PRA is developed, whose operation is controlled using tilt-gesture of a smart phone as well as human voice commands. The tilt-gestures control the direction of movement of the PRA's body. Human voice commands control the movements of PRA's arms and hands. The voice command signal is processed using an on-board voice recognition module that converts the speech signals into logical control signals. The PRA prototype can perform tasks such as turns, start/stop operations, picking-up an object and placing the object to another location. Performance evaluation is carried out through various experiments, with encouraging results. Potential applications of this tilt-gesture and voice-controlled PRA are also discussed.