Category Archives: Drone

The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing Drone Journey – Last Installment

Introduction to the Drone Journey

Final Installment

This post is the eleventh, and final, post in documenting the steps I went through on my journey to build an autonomous, voice-controlled, face recognizing drone. There are 10 other posts building up to this one which you can find at the end of this post.

Focus of this post

In this post I will share a video of the complete end-to-end demo and share details of the architecture which sits behind it. I will also share information on what I bought/used to bring this all together and relist all the different software, services and node packages in a single place.

Pulling It All Together

A lot of what we have been doing with this project is humanizing the way we communicate with machines/computers/things. That means talking and observing to drive intelligent interaction rather than using a mouse, keyboard or touch screen.

Our Autonomous Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone is a smart drone which showcases, albeit crudely, how interaction with services filled with intelligence is going to evolve. It highlights the importance of cognitive services to the success of organizations in the future.

So with that said take a look at the entire end to end demo in the video below.

Continue reading The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing Drone Journey – Last Installment

The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 9

Introduction to the Drone Journey

Telemetry Data

This post is the tenth post in documenting the steps I went through on my journey to build an autonomous, voice-controlled, face recognizing drone. There are 9 other posts building up to this one which you can find at the end of this post.

Focus of this post

Up until now we have been mostly working on controlling the drone, using the Microsoft Cognitive Services Face API to identify people and lastly making use of the Microsoft Cognitive Services API to convert text to speech and speech to text.

In this blog the focus will move to:

Ultimately we will have built an intelligent end-to-end IoT solution featuring analytics and visualization. The instructions here can be used to also understand how to get data in from other devices as well!

Continue reading The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 9

The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 8

Introduction to the Drone Journey

Speech to Text

This post is the eighth post in documenting the steps I went through on my journey to build an autonomous, voice-controlled, face recognizing drone. There are 7 other posts building up to this one which you can find at the end of this post.

Focus of this post

We have come a long way from when we first started with a drone controlled from the computer. In the last post we spent time understanding how to use the Bing Speech API to convert supplied text to speech. In this post we will:

  • Show how you can use the Bing Speech API to derive text from speech.
  • Integrate that approach into our DroneWebServer.js web application and front end HTML so that we can control the drone via speech.

Continue reading The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 8

The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 7

Introduction to the Drone Journey

Text to Speech

This post is the eighth post in documenting the steps I went through on my journey to build an autonomous, voice-controlled, face recognizing drone. There are 7 other posts building up to this one which you can find at the end of this post.

Focus of this post

This post is going to make use of another of the APIs offered by Microsoft Cognitive Services – the Bing Speech API. Back in post 4, seems a long time ago now, I explained how to sign up for the various services and get the API key.

You will need to go back now and ensure you copy the BING Speech API key as we will use that in our next steps.

By the end of this post we will have the drone speaking to us when it lands.

Continue reading The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 7

The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 6

Introduction to the Drone Journey

Face Recognition

This post is the seventh post in documenting the steps I went through on my journey to build an autonomous, voice-controlled, face recognizing drone. There are 6 other posts building up to this one which you can find at the end of this post.

Focus of this post

In this post I am going to pick-up where we left off and look at :

  • How to use the Microsoft Cognitive Services Face API to recognize a specific face. Specifically we will explore the face.identify approach.
  • How to build the identify approach into your DroneWebServer.js file such that the drone will land when it sees a named person.

My issues

I have to admit to facing quite some challenges getting face.identify to work. Using the face.identify capability requires a large number of things to be completed, in a very specific order, before it will work.

Node.js does not make doing things in a specific order easy without nested functions, callbacks and other things.  The truth is that I wasted a large number of hours before I realized that the asynchronous nature of node.js was a major source of many of  the issues I was  running into rather than me misusing the Cognitive Services APIs o any issue with the APIs themselves.

I also found that the online examples sometimes do not really give you the step by step help you might need. this looked to mostly be the case in the Node.JS world as other programming languages  seemed much more comprehensive. In the node.js world you essentially get the code to look at and try to understand which does not help with “ordering” issues.

When you add to that it is entirely possible to create things, people for example, with the same name multiple times (without realizing it) you can see where my issues came from.

I did speak with Lukas again at this stage. He told me that he set up his target faces using the SDK console rather than through code so I hit a dead end there as I was determined to try avoid that (I must admit I thought about it ;)..).

This is where my first outreach to someone at Microsoft came. I contacted Chris Thrasher who very kindly sent me some code samples he had worked on. He too found the challenge of things not being called in order which he solved using the “bluebird” package.

Thanks to his pointer and his sample code I identified a spot I was not doing something right which allowed me to move forwards.  I want to be sure to say thanks to Chris because without his help I would have stopped at face.similar.

A warning: This is a monster blog post. I decided to put it all in one rather than break it up. Grab a coffee, give yourself sometime and enjoy the ride!

Continue reading The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 6