Team Status Update for Feb 22

We have no changes to the existing design, and are currently on schedule. We have been deep diving into figuring out how specifically we will be implementing our requirements as well as working on our design report and presentation. We finalized the communication protocols we will be using to communicate between the peripherals, Raspberrry Pis, and laptop. This led to finalizing the system architecture diagram as well (image above). In addition, this week, Abha worked on the robot arm design and overall robot design and began CADing, Jade worked on determining speech processing/TTS packages and setting up the Raspberry Pis, and Ashika worked on story template generation and parts of speech detection.

Currently the most significant risks remain the same as what they were last week. The only change is with the speech recognition and TTS system. We chose to use packages for speech recognition and TTS that rely on an internet connection. This poses a risk as our robot should be able to work even when not connected to the internet. To mitigate these risks we will be relying on internet based speech recognition and TTS and should the Raspberry Pi disconnect we will have backup speech recognition and TTS packages that can operate without an internet connection. The reason we aren’t using packages that operate without an internet connection in the first place is that they often have worse speech recognition and a very robotic/choppy synthesized voice.