Risks
The most significant risk is that if our demo location is the Wiegand Gym, the surrounding background noise will be challenging for our speech detection and recognition. Our system currently works under capstone lab noise, which is similar to a restaurant’s noise level; however, it’s difficult to simulate the environment of Wiegand Gym (room size, the number of people coming to the demos, and the echoes) and, hence, we can’t properly test that our system won’t be affected. We will set up the booth with our microphone facing its back wall, hoping that the sound shield can block the noises coming from outside the booth.
Design Changes
Instead of timing out after two minutes of inactivity, our system now uses an ultrasonic distance sensor to detect whether a customer is present in the ordering area. This means that we will be able to terminate an order interaction and remove the current order if the serviced customer walks away from the kiosk without checking out. This ultrasonic distance sensor will also be used to wake up our kiosk when a new customer approaches. We will also attach an ultrasonic distance sensor to the mic so that we can remind the customer to stand closer to the mic when speaking.
In addition, we are still debating on whether to add a computer vision system that detects the number of customers waiting in line. This depends on whether we can find two poles that are tall enough to hang the overhead camera for detection. If the poles are not tall enough, the detection success rate would drop significantly, and therefore not worth having the camera/cv part at all.
Schedule
We are on track with our current schedule.