Northern Illinois University
Department of Engineering Technology
College of Engineering and Engineering Technology

Text Reader

The system is designed to extract content from written documents or commercially printed materials. In terms of hardware, it utilizes a camera, an embedded processor board, and an Alexa Echo Dot. The software involves an open-source text detection library called Tesseract, along with Leptonica and OpenCV. The current version of the system can only work with English text. By using Amazon Web Services, a skill set was deployed to read aloud the detected text via an OpenCV program through the Alexa Echo Dot.     Demo Video

Mobile Robot Control

The system is designed to control a mobile robot for pick-and-place activities.  It utilizes an off-the-shelf mobile robot, a camera, an embedded processor board, and an Alexa Echo Dot.  The software involves OpenCV.  Using Amazon Web Services, a skill set was developed to interpret audio instructions as driving commands for the robot.    Demo Video

Drone Control

The system is designed to control a drone via Amazon Web Services.  It utilizes a commercially available drone, an embedded processor board, and an Alexa Echo Dot.  Using Amazon Web Services, a skill set was developed to interpret audio instructions as commands for the drone to track an object of a specific color.  The drone is equipped with an ARM processor, two cameras, and a Linux operating system.   Demo Video