tensorflow

59 Articles

DIY Personal Assistant Robot Hears And Sees All

August 11, 2019 by 2 Comments

Who wouldn’t want a robot that can fetch them a glass of water? [Saral Tayal] didn’t just think that, he jumped right in and built his own personal assistant robot. This isn’t just some remote-controlled rover though. The robot actually listens to his voice and recognizes his face.

The body of the robot is the common “Rover 5” platform, to which [Saral] added a number of 3D printed parts. A forklift like sled gives the robot the ability to pick things up. Some of the parts are more about form than function – [Saral] loves NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, so he added some simulated solar cells and other greebles.

The Logitech webcam up front is very functional — images are fed to machine learning models, while audio is processed to listen for commands. This robot can find and pick up 90 unique objects.

The robot’s brains are a Raspberry Pi. It uses TensorFlow for object recognition. Some of the models [Saral] is using are pretty large – so big that the Pi could only manage a couple of frames per second at 100% CPU utilization. A Google Coral coprocessor sped things up quite a bit, while only using about 30% of the Pi’s processor.

It takes several motors to control to robot’s tracks and sled. This is handled by two Roboclaw motor controllers which themselves are commanded by the Pi.

We’ve seen quite a few mobile robot rovers over the years, but [Saral’s] ‘bot is one of the most functional designs out there. Even better is the fact that it is completely open source. You can find the code and 3D models on his GitHub repo.

Check out a video of the personal assistant rover in action after the break.

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Google Launches AI Platform That Looks Remarkably Like A Raspberry Pi

March 5, 2019 by 80 Comments

Google has promised us new hardware products for machine learning at the edge, and now it’s finally out. The thing you’re going to take away from this is that Google built a Raspberry Pi with machine learning. This is Google’s Coral, with an Edge TPU platform, a custom-made ASIC that is designed to run machine learning algorithms ‘at the edge’. Here is the link to the board that looks like a Raspberry Pi.

This new hardware was launched ahead of the TensorFlow Dev Summit, revolving around machine learning and ‘AI’ in embedded applications, specifically power- and computationally-limited environments. This is ‘the edge’ in marketing speak, and already we’ve seen a few products designed from the ground up to run ML algorithms and inference in embedded applications. There are RISC-V microcontrollers with machine learning accelerators available now, and Nvidia has been working on this for years. Now Google is throwing their hat into the ring with a custom-designed ASIC that accelerates TensorFlow. It just so happens that the board looks like a Raspberry Pi.

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PrintRite Uses TensorFlow To Avoid Printing Catastrophies

March 3, 2019 by 14 Comments

TensorFlow is a popular machine learning package, that among other things, is particularly adept at image recognition. If you want to use a webcam to monitor cats on your lawn or alert you to visitors, TensorFlow can help you achieve this with a bunch of pre-baked libraries. [Eric] took a different tack with PrintRite – using TensorFlow to monitor his 3D printer and warn him of prints gone bad – or worse.

The project relies on training TensorFlow to recognize images of 3D prints gone bad. If layers are separated, or the nozzle is covered in melted goo, it’s probably a good idea to stop the print. Worst case, your printer could begin smoking or catch fire – in that case, [Eric] has the system configured to shut the printer off using a TP-Link Wi-Fi enabled power socket.

Currently, the project exists as a plugin for OctoPrint and relies on two Raspberry Pis – a Zero to handle the camera, and a 3B+to handle OctoPrint and the TensorFlow software. It’s in an early stage of development and is likely not quite ready to replace human supervision. Still, this is a project that holds a lot of promise, and we’re eager to see further development in this area.

There’s a lot of development happening to improve the reliability of 3D printers – we’ve even seen a trick device for resuming failed prints.

Leigh Johnson’s Guide To Machine Vision On Raspberry Pi

March 1, 2019 by 9 Comments

We salute hackers who make technology useful for people in emerging markets. Leigh Johnson joined that select group when she accepted the challenge to build portable machine vision units that work offline and can be deployed for under $100 each. For hardware, a Raspberry Pi with camera plus screen can fit under that cost ceiling, and the software to give it sight is the focus of her 2018 Hackaday Superconference presentation. (Video also embedded below.)

The talk is a very concise 13 minutes, so Leigh flies through definitions of basic terms, before quickly naming TensorFlow and Keras as the tools she used. The time she saved here was spent on explaining what convolutional neural networks are and how they work, just enough to prepare the audience. But all of that is really just background, the meat of the talk is self-contained examples that Leigh has put together and made available online. I love to see that since it means you go beyond just watching and try it out for yourself. Continue reading “Leigh Johnson’s Guide To Machine Vision On Raspberry Pi” →

Ludwig Promises Easy Machine Learning From Uber

February 25, 2019 by 3 Comments

Machine learning has brought an old idea — neural networks — to bear on a range of previously difficult problems such as handwriting and speech recognition. Better software and hardware has made it feasible to apply sophisticated machine learning algorithms that would have previously been only possible on giant supercomputers. However, there’s still a learning curve for developing both models and software to use these trained models. Uber — you know, the guys that drive you home when you’ve had a bit too much — have what they are calling a “code-free deep learning toolbox” named Ludwig. The promise is you can create, train, and use models to extract features from data without writing any code. You can find the project itself on GitHub.io.

The toolbox is built over TensorFlow and they claim:

Ludwig is unique in its ability to help make deep learning easier to understand for non-experts and enable faster model improvement iteration cycles for experienced machine learning developers and researchers alike. By using Ludwig, experts and researchers can simplify the prototyping process and streamline data processing so that they can focus on developing deep learning architectures rather than data wrangling.

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A Star-Trek-Inspired Robot With Raspberry Pi And AI

December 21, 2018 by 1 Comment

When [314Reactor] got a robot car kit, he knew he wanted to add some extra things to it. At about the same time he was watching a Star Trek episode that featured exocomps — robots that worked in dangerous areas. He decided to use those fictional devices to inspire his modifications to the car kit. Granted, the fictional robots were intelligent and had a replicator. So you know he won’t make an actual working replica. But then again, the ones on the TV show didn’t have all that either.

A Raspberry Pi runs Tensorflow using the standard camera.  This lets it identify objects of interest (assuming it gets them right) and sends the image back to the operator along with some identifying information. The kit already had an Arduino onboard and the new robot talks to it via a serial port. You can see a video about the project, below.

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Neural Network Knows When Cat Wants To Go Outside

December 21, 2018 by 38 Comments

Neural networks are computer systems that are vaguely inspired by the construction of animal brains, and much like human brains, can be trained to obey the whims of the almighty domestic cat. [EdjeElectronics] has built just such a system, and his cat is better off for it.

The build uses a Raspberry Pi, fitted with the Pi Camera board, to image the area around the back door of the house. A Python script regularly captures images and passes them to a TensorFlow neural network for object recognition. The TensorFlow network returns object type and positions to the Python script. This information can be used to determine if there is a cat in the frame, and if it is inside or outside. If the cat remains in position for ten consecutive frames, a text message is sent via Twilio, indicating to the owner to let the cat in or out, as the case may be.

Thirty years ago, object classification was a pie-in-the-sky technology, but now you can run it on a $30 computer to figure out where your pets are. What a time we live in! A similar solution to this problem may be a cat door that unlocks via facial recognition. Video after the break.

[Thanks to Baldpower for the tip!]

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