The aim of this work is to develop a humming-based solution to emulate joystick-type continuous commands for hands-free control of robots. Think-A-Move (TAM) has previously developed speech and tongue movement based hands-free control systems that work consistently even in extremely noisy environments. The novel idea behind this technology is that the acoustic signal is captured in the ear canal using a patented earpiece developed at TAM. The earpiece has a microphone which points into the ear canal to capture the sound signals. Speech based control is limited to producing discrete commands that are difficult to adapt to joystick-type directional robot control. With the addition of humming control to our system, the robot can sustain a continuous action as long as the operator keeps humming, thus providing the operator the ability to precisely control the robot. Besides continuous signal delivery, humming allows the operator to continuously vary a control signal by varying the pitch of the hum. This can have multiple uses. For example, an increase or decrease in pitch can be mapped to turning right or left. This is particularly useful for an operator to execute multiple, minute changes in direction for precise control. Using discrete speech commands, with inherent time delays, multiple, rapid corrections in direction are difficult. Varying pitch can also be used to implement continuous variation in velocity. For example, consider the case of pan-control of a camera using humming. To pan a camera over a vista to locate an object of interest, a user might want to sweep the camera rapidly over certain regions and then move it more slowly over others for increased scrutiny.
展开▼
