1. Sean Lyons EEL4665C- IMDL Spring 2014 3/20/14
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
AROSOL Final Report
Sean Lyons
EEL4665C- IMDL Spring 2014
3/20/14

2. AROSOL – Autonomous Roving Sound Locator
Summary:
As a lifelong hobby musician, sound is one of my favorite areas in engineering for projects. The challenge was to build a robot that can “hear” even in a noisy room:
0.97 cent electret mics
Op-Amps from Junior Design
Styrofoam bowls
Lessons Learned: Analog is challenging, audio is very challenging. Precision analog audio with cheap components is VERY CHALLENGING

3. AROSOL – Autonomous Roving Sound Locator
Binaural Sound:

4. AROSOL – Autonomous Roving Sound Locator
Final Product: Features (“The Pudding”)
Sound Localization
Use Op-Amps, Instrumentation Amps, Comparators, and passive components to determine (within ~100 degrees) the source of sound.
Object Recognition
Use openCV to detect color of sound generator to aide the ears in finding the sound.
Obstacle Detection/Avoidance
Use low level (IR/Bump) sensors to gather environment data
Arrive at location without collision

5. AROSOL – Autonomous Roving Sound Locator
Reality
Dream

6. AROSOL – Autonomous Roving Sound Locator
Road to Demo Day
Smooth Sound Localization
By nature is a “jerky” process (reading from each ear as binary)
Implement LibSerial (C++)
Get working vision code on Raspberry Pi to talk to motor drivers via USART
Finalize “the sandbox”
Find out limitations of design and limit test/ demo environment to account for it. Finalize ODOA code

7. AROSOL – Autonomous Roving Sound Locator
Mics
Active Band Pass Filter (two channel)
Instrumentation Amp
1000x Gain
Envelope Detector
RC filtered
Comparator
2 bit output
Microcontroller
Analog to the rescue!

8. AROSOL – Autonomous Roving Sound Locator

9. AROSOL – Autonomous Roving Sound Locator
Future Work/Thanks:
Use a DSP. Did I mention using a DSP?
Redesign analog using precision passive components or IC filters.
Get speech detection working.