Here’s what i’m proposing, what if we made a real AI. something that’s “alive”. it would respond to you by voice and recognize you by actually seeing you via camera. If you’re familiar with Apple’s Siri on iphone, then it would be similar to it but better (hopefully). What it ultimately breaks down to is giving it basic human communication, voice recognition/speech and video tracking.
here’s some examples i found of how it would work and some functions:
this is an Arduino taking voice commands and responds by voice.
another is this Arduino singing
It’s using a speech synthesizer from a project called Cantarino. The project facilitates the use of phonemes from the SAM Apple II synthesizer to build wave forms that make up recognizable speech on the Arduino platform (sentence taken from this artical).
Lastly, two examples of video tracking. here’s one made to act like a sentry turret from Valve’s Portal video game using a webcam:
it shows a great example of how the cam finds the target and tracks it. Also, this post that goes into great detail on using a simple webcam to video track you. Both use servo motors for movement but for my project its not necessary. Later if there’s time and this project get going then that part can be added and give it a form.
so that is what i’m proposing. lets make a new member to the class that we can call our own and be proud of.
UPDATE: here’s an example of a real Wheatley robot from Portal 2 that I seen a year ago
“lets make a new member to the class that we can call our own and be proud of.”
This reminds me of this line from Blade Runner:
“I make friends! My friends are toys…..I make them!”
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/an-qCKQJJYbYhYn4/blade_runner_1982_sebastians_toys/
Some of the webcam stuff would be most easily done on one of the macs running processing (and there are some good voice synthesis libraries available, and OS X has good voice recognition software included) but there is definitely some things which could be done with the arduino. This is a project that could easily be combined with many of the other project ideas.
It seems like the main thing you are going for is making a machine system seem convincingly human or at least human like, I’d recommend developing that idea a bit more, you provided some good examples with the turrets from portal (which seem very human like despite having very limited forms of interaction ) so it looks like you have a good start on that. In AI world one of the gold standards for creating AI systems is a thing called the turing test (named after Alan Turing who we discussed in class) which might be something to think about in your design:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
There are numerous competitions related to the turing test (with cash and prizes!) and there are already some machines which can pass this test in limited ways (gaming bots that seem more human than human players http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120926133235.htm )
Remember, if you’re going to do this, be sure to give it a British Accent!