The Raspberry Pi is a very popular choice for makers building robotic cars. But if you’ve got something so high-powered, why not shake up expectations by throwing in some fancy features? Today, we have a cool example of just that to share by a maker, Robotcus, over at YouTube. He’s created a robotic car from scratch that uses a Raspberry Pi Zero to process voice commands for control.
According to Robotcus, the goal was to create a robotic car that anyone who can speak would be able to operate. It’s designed to process audio input with speech-to-text to handle five basic commands. The car can drive forwards, turn left and right, drive backward, and attack.
The video shows how the software works with the speech recognition model. Robotcus demonstrates how it can listen for specific keywords and process them into input for the motors to spin the wheels. The commands are straightforward—saying drive will move the car forward, etc.
In addition to the Raspberry Pi, Robotcus created a motor driver from scratch. This allows him to control not only the direction of the motor’s spin but also its speed. All of the hardware is housed inside the car, which uses a custom 3D-printed frame and set of wheels that Robotcus designed himself.
The code for the speech recognition software was written in Python. We get a look at the code in the video, along with test drives of the car. If you want to see this Raspberry Pi project in action, check out the official video shared on YouTube, and be sure to follow Robotcus for more cool creations as well as any future updates on this one.
