HelloSpoon, a cute meal-assistant robot!

Robotics and electronics discussion Share your projects
1

Hi everybody in the forum,

My name is Luis García and I’m the developer behind HelloSpoon robot.
What is HelloSpoon robot?
HelloSpoon is a mobile-based affordable robot intended to spend time with children with upper limb difficulties, children with special needs and elderly during the three most important times of the days for all of us (breakfast, meal, dinner).

Here I want to share with all of you one video with me testing HelloSpoon before doing the real testing with children and elderly. I wanted to do this to be 100% sure that HelloSpoon is safe enough to be used by actual people.

Just some technical info about HelloSpoon:

HelloSpoon main core is a mobile application which uses PocketSphinx as voice recognition engine, changes animations according to what is doing, play tunes and cheer the user (which is configurable to be turned on/off from settings).
The main control board is an OpenCM-9.04 from ROBOTIS and the robotic trunk is created using the new Dynamixel XL-320 actuators.
HelloSpoon has in development more than one year, and it started using Dynamixel Ax-12 as actuators then when XL-320 where presented at the beginning of this year I was able to redesign the whole robot to make it really affordable.

Hope you like what you see, please feel free to leave any comment, what you like, what you don’t like and more important if you like what you see share it! so more people will be aware than a development like HelloSpoon is being made :slight_smile:

Thanks for taking your time!

2

Hi, Luis.

Your project looks great; thank you for sharing it! We would love to see the results of your test with real children and the elderly. I am especially excited to see their reaction to the cheery tunes.

-Amanda

3

Hi Amanda,

I’ll share it here again when that happens :slight_smile:!
Hopefully the children will love it, the elderly I’m not really sure but there’s a settings page to deactivate what could be annoying for older people.

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4

Well, I just want to share a video highlighting the children reactions :slight_smile:!
Meet Marisol and Jazmin, two cute little girls who accepted to try HelloSpoon without even know him (their parents accepted too).

Marisol is a 5 years old kid with Down Syndrome, and Jazmin is her older 7 years old sister who doesn’t feel very excited when you say the word “robot”.

I hope you enjoy this unique video :slight_smile:

A new video focus on a real user and showing how his life is being improved by HelloSpoon will be finished soon :slight_smile:!

5

Cool update; it was great to see the children having fun with HelloSpoon. I can’t wait to see the next video of it in action!

- Amanda

6

And here’s a new update :slight_smile:!

Meet Mr. Amado Gonzalez, he suffered an accident and injured his right arm. As a right handed person grab the spoon and feed himself is very difficult, also he feels ashamed asking other people to feed him.
He voluntarily wanted to test HelloSpoon robot, and I can’t say no to him :slight_smile:!

Here’s the video of him using the robot and showing us a bit of his situation: