Re: [Playerstage-users] SoundProxy. p2os_sound driver. PeopleBot

[Brian G. <ge...@ai...>]

On Thu, 14 Oct 2004, Reed Hedges wrote:

> There are three ways to make sounds on Pioneer and family, if I remember 
> correctly (consult the robot's manual for definitive information):
>
> 1. With the robot's piezo speaker ("squeaker"), which can produce a certain 
> range of beep tones for some duration.  You send a "SAY" command to the 
> microcontroller to do this.  Would anyone be interested it having this 
> function in Player?

This shouldn't be too hard to add to the 'p2os' driver.  It could support the
'audiodsp' interface, which allows the client to specify amplitude,
frequency, and duration of a tone to play.

> 2. With the robot's computer and speakers. Peoplebots have these standard, 
> for Pioneer robots it's an option. This is part of the onboard computer (PC) 
> system.  Aria has a few features for playing WAV files, and synthesizing 
> speech if you have e.g. Festival installed ("ArSpeech").

Player also has support for Festival, via the 'festival' driver, which
supports the 'speech' interface:
   http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/doc/Player-manual-1.5-html/node71.html
Note that you first need to install Festival.

If your robot has a fast computer (speech synthesis is expensive)
and speakers, I highly recommend that you try this.  Having the robot
speak to you is a great form of feedback, it helps with debugging, and
is easier on the eyes than staring at lines of text flying by in a window.

> 3. On the AmigoBot only, you can store some number of saved sounds and play 
> them on command.  You send a "PLAY" command to the microcontroller to do 
> this.  On non-AmigoBot robots this command does nothing.  This command is not 
> even in the Pioneer 3 manual, it seems (Though "PLAYLIST" is, oops.)
>
> Player's "sound" device is for #3.

Right.  I suppose if there were interest in playing pre-recorded sounds,
someone could write a general-purpose (that is, not-AmigoBot specific)
driver that supports the 'sound' interface by sending .wav (or .au or
.aiff or whatever) files to /dev/dsp.  The user would specify the list
of files to be played in the .cfg file.

         brian.

-- 
Brian P. Gerkey                    ge...@ai...
Stanford AI Lab                    http://ai.stanford.edu/~gerkey