DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF A VOICE-ACTIVATED DIRECTION CONTROL SYSTEM FOR INTELLIGENT ROBOTIC VEHICLES

Abstract

Voice controlled robotic systems have become an effective way to enhance human–machine interaction, especially for assistive and intelligent mobility systems. In this paper, the design and development of a Voice-Activated Direction Control System of Intelligent Robotic Vehicles (IRV) which allows controlling the movement of the vehicle by using simple voice commands are presented. The proposed system will be integrated with an Arduino Uno microcontroller, Bluetooth communication module, speech recognition application developed in the Android platform, ultrasonic obstacle detection sensor and motor driver circuit to get a reliable and cost-effective navigation platform. Voice control is handled by a smartphone (voice recognition), and then sent wirelessly to the robotic vehicle (Forward, Backward, Left, Right and Stop). The commands received are interpreted by the Arduino controller which generates motor control signals. For better safety level, an ultrasonic sensor is always monitoring the surrounding environment and if and when an obstacle is detected within a defined distance, the vehicle is automatically stopped. Three experimental studies have been carried out to evaluate the command recognition accuracy, command response time and system performance. The developed prototype's recognition accuracy, precision, recall and F1-scores were 96.8%, 95.9%, 95.4% and 95.6% respectively, with an average response time of less than one second. The outcomes prove that the proposed system is suitable for the intelligent robotic navigation and assistive mobility applications, which is efficient, easy to operate and cost effective.