2018 International Conference on Design Innovations for 3Cs Compute Communicate Control
A Personal Assistant Robot Using Raspberry Pi
I Hameem Shanavas Parthasarathy Reddy B
Department of Electronics and Department of Electronics and
Communication Communication
MVJ College of Engineering, MVJ College of Engineering,
Bangalore, India. Bangalore, India.
hameem.shanavas@gmail.com parthaec1196@gmail.com
Abstract— Technology is growing at an unexpectedly fast pace
with the unveiling of the family friendly robots that play the role
of a personal assistant at home. Man has already started
interacting with computers and smartphones. It is anticipated
that social robots shall replace these computers and smartphones
in the near future. This work is delving into the design of one
such social robot, which supports the above proposition. This
paper discusses of an interactive personal assistant robot that is
developed using the Raspberry Pi computing engine.
Keywords— Family Friendly Robots, Interactive Personal
Assistant, Social Robot, Raspberry Pi.
I. INTRODUCTION
This paper exemplifies the words as stated by a great
entrepreneur - “The mobile computing revolution has paved its
way for social robots to come into the home, both from a
technological price/performance perspective and a consumer
readiness perspective”. With the advancement in the
technology today, it isn’t a wonder if people get used to
having a family friendly personal assistant or social robots [1]
in the near future. Many elderly folks and physically disabled
people at home require the support of some person for their
everyday chores.
Sometimes, after a long tiring day at work, people would
prefer music and spending some time on the social media for
relief from stress. Cooking alone by e-learning may every so
often be monotonous and there would arise a need for an
interactive environment. In such cases social robots may be
very handy. This paper proposes the model of one such voice
sustained personal assistant robot. The design of the robot is
described in a very simple manner and the various aspects of
its design are explored.
II. RELATED WORKS
This robot is dissevered into two parts for a
comprehensive approach towards understanding – the
locomotion part and the main body.
A. The locomotion setup of the robot is enlivened by the
works from the following papers:
The physics behind the balancing of the bi-wheeled robot
has been understood. The robot is designed as a feedback
system with the aid of an inertial measurement unit. The
978-1-5386-7523-6/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE 133
DOI 10.1109/ICDI3C.2018.00038
Manoj C Doddegowda
Department of Electronics and
Communication
MVJ College of Engineering,
Bangalore, India.
ckpm9740@gmail.com
history of self-balancing robots can be dated back to the
year 2000.
1. Joe Le-Pendule was a radio controlled, two sensors
based, and two control system self-balancing robot
designed by Felix Grasser in the year 2000. [2]
2. The Nbot designed by David Anderson in 2003 was a
self-balancing robot that made use of four sensors
including optical encoders to measure the rate of tilt
and acceleration of the robot. The values from the
three sensors were fused using a Weiner filter and
understood for further balancing of the robot using a
HC11 microcontroller. [3]
3. Furthermore, Steve Hassenplug built a Lego brick
based self-balancing robot which used infrared
proximity sensors to measure the tilt angle of robot.
This robot became to be known as a Legway. Similar
work on Legways was performed by Dan Piponi and
Jian-Hao-Hang. [4]
4. The most recent development in this field is the Dean
Kamen’s Segway which is the pinnacle of all the
above works. Becoming a human transport system that
is pre-eminently called the balancing scooter. [5]
The above works were a conglomeration of various ideas
based on various aspects like number of sensors, size, and
material used to build, power consumption, etc.
Cognizing much of the theory from the above works, this
paper endeavours in designing the model as a feedback
system based on a single IMU.
B. Edging forward to the main body of the robot, this moiety
is motivated by:
1. The design of Android based Voice Assistant
application allowing voice control of Serbian language
using the open-source Kaldi speech recognition
toolkit. [6]
 2. The prototype of a smart Personal Robotic Assistants
(PRA) developed by Pooja Makula and team whose
model is controlled by voice commands. [7]
3. The design of a cooking assistant service which uses
the interactive robot for solving issues related to
cooking. [8]
4. The description of a practical design for the automatic
speech recognition and spoken language
understanding systems of a voice based personal
assistant application that was commercially released in
Japan in 2012. [9]
These were certain works which formed the guidance
for this model. Encapsulating the methodologies and
concepts used to design a voice assistant from the
above stated works, some technologies like the Google
Search API, GTTS, Espeak, etc are used in developing
this model.
III. MATERIALS USED
The following are the vital hardware features used in the
design of the robot:
A. Microcontroller:
The Atmega 328P on the Arduino Uno board is used to
process the raw values from the inertial measurement unit and
convert them into a user understandable format. The Arduino
is a software development environment that is compatible with
the Atmega AVR microcontrollers. The Uno consists of 14
digital output pins along with a USB jack, an ICSP header and
a reset button on-board.
B. Microcomputer:
The Raspberry Pi model 3B is used as a computing engine.
It is a credit card sized computer with 1.2 Ghz quad-core
ARM CortexA53 CPU and a Broadcom BCM2837 SoC. It has
an on-board memory of 1GB which is a LPDDR2-900
SDRAM.
There are 4 USB 3.0 ports and a 10/100 MBPS ethernet,
802.11n wireless LAN, Bluetooth 4.0.
C. Inertial Measurement Unit:
The MPU 6050 – 3 axis gyroscope with accelerometer is
used as the IMU. This module has the InvenSense’s
MotionFusionTM and runtime calibration firmware embedded
in it. It has the Digital Motion Processing unit present on-
board. The tilt angle and the rate of change of acceleration of
the self-balancing robot is determined using the IMU.
D. DC Motors:
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Two 150RPM DC motors are used for locomotion purpose.
The advantage of these motors is that their speed can be
controlled by varying the supply voltage or by varying the
strength of the current in the field windings.
E. Motor Driver:
The Arduino Uno outputs a 5V on its digital output pins
which is insufficient to drive the DC motors. Hence the need
for an amplifier is fulfilled by the use of a L298N dual H-
Bridge Motor Driver. These motor drivers can be used to drive
motors that have a voltage range of 5 to 35V. These boards
also have an on-board voltage regulator which provides a 5V
output from the 12V input supply.
IV. METHODOLOGY
The self-balancing part of the robot works on the principle
of dynamic balancing. The physics behind this self-balancing
setup is that when the body with the weight placed at the top
and pivoted about two wheels, tries to lean or fall towards one
side then a pseudo force is generated in the obverse direction
of the fall in order to prevent the fall of the robot. This could
be well understood as an inverted pendulum shown in the fig
1.a.
Fig 1.a: Free body diagram of self-balancing robot
The microcontroller is used as the brain for the self-
balancing setup. The motor driver used is L298N which is a
H-Bridge configuration that amplifies the 5V output from the
digital pins of the microcontroller in order to drive the motors.
A 3-axis accelerometer with gyroscope is used to measure the
tilt angles and falling speeds of the setup. The power source
used is a LiPo battery of 12V. The self-balancing robot chassis
has been made out of wood to give a rigid structure. More
extensively, the accelerometer is used to detect the variations
in acceleration of the robot and the gyroscope is used to
measure the angle of inclinations or tilt of the robot. The
operation of the robot is that due to external forces or improper
stance of the robot, it tends to fall in one direction. The values
of acceleration and tilt angles at this moment are measured and
recorded by the sensors and then sent to the microcontroller. A
glimpse of the serial monitor showing the sensor values
obtained by the MPU 6050 is shown in fig 1.b. Now these
values are interpreted by the microcontroller using PID control
mechanism and then appropriate movements in the two motors
are made in order to produce a pseudo force that helps in
retaining the verticality of the robot. The flow chart of the self-
balancing setup of the model is shown in fig 1.c. Once the
calibration of the self-balancing robot is achieved then it is
jockeyed using Bluetooth.

The second part of the robot is the voice assistant. The

voice assistant utilizes the Google API services. The principle
behind this part is that the voice signal from the human is
acquired by the web-camera consisting of an in-built Fig 1.b: Glimpse of the serial monitor showing the digital motion
processed values of accelerometer and gyroscope obtained by the MPU 6050.
microphone. Next, these signals are converted to a format
understandable by the computer. The technology used in this
conversion is the Google Text To Speech (GTTS) conversion
service. Using this converted signal, the computer searches for
the appropriate actions to be performed or response to be
replied back for the commands given by the human, on the
google cloud platform. Once the search has been found the
result has to be output on the speaker so as to be heard by the
human. This process of conversion of a digital/text signal to a
voice signal is implemented using the ESpeak service. A block
diagram of the operation of the voice assistant is as shown in
fig 1.d.

Fig 1.d: Block diagram of operation of voice assistant.

V. RESULTS
An experiment was conducted when the robot was
balancing along with voice assistant kit mounted on it. The
prototype model developed is shown in the fig 1.e.

Fig 1.c: Flow chart of the working of the self-balancing setup.

Fig 1.e: Prototype of the proposed personal assistant robot.

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 An instance of the interaction with the robot in the
experiment is described in the table 1.a shown below.
Table 1.a: Interaction between human and robot
User What is the news today?
robot could substitute a security guard/receptionist in the front
desk of an organisation.
Such robots can be used as home tutors as well as teachers
at a primary school to aid the physically challenged children.

Robot Here’s the latest news today. Whatsapp VII. CONCLUSION

adds ‘Dismiss as Admin’ feature; Beta With the increase in the use of family friendly robots this
app gets ‘High priority notifications’. voice based personal assistant robot finds useful applications
in modern homes. The robot presented in this paper creates an
User Who is the principal of MVJ College of interactive environment for the user and assists him virtually
Engineering? as seen in the above experiment. This justifies its cause of a
Robot The principal of MVJ College of personal assistance. A sample instance of the interaction
Engineering is Dr. N Gunashekaran. environment of the system as shown in the table 1.a supports
this assertion.
User What is 467 times 104?
REFERENCES
Robot It is 48568. [1] Amy Eguchi and Hiroyuki Okada, Learning with social robots-The
world robot summit’s approach, Integrated STEM Education
User Please add a kilo of Tomatoes on my Conference (ISEC) 2018.
shopping list.
[2] Felix Grasser, Aldo D’Arrigo,Silvio Colombi, and Alfred Rufer., “ Joe:
A mobile, inverted pendulum. “Laboratory of Industrial Electronics,
Robot Sure. I have added a kilo of tomatoes Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, EPFL, Switzerland.
on your shopping list.
[3] David P.Anderson, “nBot Balancing Robot” SMU©., 14 Sep. 2013.
User Which is the latest email on my Gmail
[4] Jian-Hao Hong, Dept. of Power Mech. Eng., Nat. Tsing Hua Univ.,
account? Hsinchu, Taiwan, “Analysis and design of a passive steering
mechanism for a pedaled, self-balanced, personal mobility vehicle” in
Robot You have an email from Barbara System Integration(SII), 2013, IEEE/SICE International Symposium.
Parker.
[5] Prof. Yogesh Risodkar, Ganesh Shrisath, Monali Holkar and Mayur
User How do you rate Drexel University? Amle, “Designing the self-balancing platform(Segway),” Electronics
and Telecommunication Department, SIEM, IJSETR, vol 4, issue 9,
Robot Drexel University is rated by google as Sept.,2015.
3.5 on a scale of 5 [6] Brainslav Popovie, Edvin Pakoci, NiksaJakovljevic, “Voice Assistant
application for the Serbian Language,”. 23rd Telecommunication forum
User What is on shopping list today? TELFOR 2015.

Robot You need to purchase a kilo of
tomatoes.
VI. FUTURE SCOPE
The robot can be employed with servo motors which can
substitute the role of robot arms. These arms could be voice
controlled and the robot finds itself useful in some pick and
place applications.
Instead of manoeuvring the robot using Bluetooth, it could
be controlled using voice commands or gesture controls. These
features add more essence to the interactive environment
created by the robot.
[7] Anurag Mishra1, Pooja Makula2, Akshay Kumar3, Krit Karan4 and V.
K. Mittal5, Indian Institute of Information Technology, “A voice-
controlled personal assistant robot,”, 2015 International Conference on
Industrial Instrumentation and Control (ICIC).
[8] Seiichi Kumagai, Tomako Sato and Hiroki Sano, Graduate School of
Industrial Technology, Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology, 1-
10-40 Higashi-Ohi, Shinagawa-Ku, Tokyo, Japan,” Cooking assistant
service utilizing an interactive robot,”, System Integration(SII), 2017
IEEE/SICE International Symposium.
[9] Kosuke Tsujino, Shinya Lizuka and Yusuke Nakashima, Res. Labs.,
NTT DOCOMO, Inc., Yokosuka, Japan, “Speech Recognition and
Spoken Language Understanding for Mobile Personal Assistants: A
case Study of “Shabette Concier”,”, Mobile data management(MDM),
2013 IEEE 14th International Conference.

Some Multiple Face recognition and synthesis algorithms

could be deployed in the robot’s computing engine so that the

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