HelloSpoon Stories

Here's where you can read more about HelloSpoon robot and his adventures!

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Spark Core just arrived!

What are we planning to do with it?

Well, we want to transform HelloSpoon in a Cloud robot to give the chance of being tele operated from any family member/caregiver/nurse if it's needed without being in the same room and create a richer experience.

We believe that it will be a very useful feature! But it will be experimental at this moment because we'll need to remove completely the actual board (OpenCM-9.04).

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Articles and more resources to read about HelloSpoon.

In a few hours the Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign will go live!

I need to polish the last details and this blog entry is part of that :-)

Here you can find the articles that talk about HelloSpoon to let you know more about it and a few extras!

*This entry will be updated with all the new articles written when the campaign goes live.

English articles:

IEEE Spectrum: Video Friday: Open Source Humanoid, HelloSpoon and Drone Versus the Volcano.

Robohub: HelloSpoon, a fun affordable mealtime assistant with upper limb disabilities.

SimpleBotics: HelloSpoon is an Assistive robot arm that can feed you.

Gadgetify: HelloSpoon: Robot that can feed you

Robotics Today: HelloSpoon, an Affordable Meal Assistance Robot

Bot Bench: Making Meals Fun: HelloSpoon

VICE MotherBoard: This Adorable DIY Spoon-Bot is here to help you eat

Spanish article:

Make-a-tronik: HelloSpoon, el robot asistente que te ayuda a la hora de la comida

Other news:

Robohub: Robot Launch 2014, First Round Favorites

Extras:

Let's Make Robots Project Page!

Damn Dad: HelloSpoon, an Interview with Luis Garcia 

Interview made by Lucas Choate that involves a lot of info about HelloSpoon and myself about the development and much more else!

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HelloSpoon app v1.0.1 released!

HelloSpoon application, which is the main core behind HelloSpoon has received an update a few minutes ago :-)

What's new on the 1.0.1 version?

- The first time you open HelloSpoon app there will be a prompt asking you who is going to interact with HelloSpoon, children or elderly? This is made with the intention of shape the behavior of HelloSpoon according to the user selected. 

For children, HelloSpoon will have a very happy and childish behavior.

For elderly, HelloSpoon will have a very respectful behavior to don't result obnoxious.

- There's also a new button added on the Settings screen that will let you change the profile if there's a need to do that.

- Some bugs fixed.

- New icons added for bigger resolutions!

And basically that's it behind 1.0.1 version of HelloSpoon, while there's much work to do this is going in the right direction :-).

Some screenshots of the new version:

Are you reading and you have an Android device and haven't tested the app yet? Write HelloSpoon on Google Play Store and take a look :-).

You can click here and download it to your device from your PC.

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HelloSpoon: An Adorable Mealtime Assistant

HelloSpoon is a baby elephant inspired robot focus to give a fun and happy mealtime to children and the elderly who have upper limb difficulties and special needs. HelloSpoon is fun for the user and a little bit of a break for caretakers.

The motivation behind HelloSpoon was create an affordable and fun solution for the user and help them to recover their independence while having a good time. 

Here you can take a look to the main features of HelloSpoon robot:

HelloSpoon's mission and goal.

The main goal behind HelloSpoon is not only be a feeding machine, there are feeding machines already but be a "mealtime assistant". What does this mean?

Well, HelloSpoon is able to talk with you, understand what you are saying, play songs, do a little dance, cheer you on after every bite and be a cute robot. All at the same time (and being optional, by the way). 

Just a little comparison with the costs of actual feeding machines in the market:

What makes HelloSpoon so affordable?

Now let's talk a bit about the hardware used on HelloSpoon robot. All revolves around the Dynamixel XL-320 smart actuator from the korean company ROBOTIS.

This is the same actuator that's being used on Darwin-mini robot; actually HelloSpoon and Darwin-mini are like cousins, almost brothers because they share the same components.

But what really makes HelloSpoon an affordable solution is that the core of HelloSpoon is a smartphone application (you can download it from the Google Play Store right now) thanks to this is possible to build services around the platform and sell the hardware with a very competitive price.

Who is behind HelloSpoon robot?

My name is Luis Garcia and I'm the developer behind HelloSpoon robot. I'm a 24 years old Mechatronics Engineer who has been involved into robotics and AI projects since I was 20 years old.

I started to build HelloSpoon more than a year ago (here you can take a look to the whole evolution of HelloSpoon since February 2013) in my bedroom in Mexico.

I'm the developer, designer, programmer, maker, etc. behind HelloSpoon but I've received a lot of suggestions and feedback from people from Bay Area Maker Faire 2014, Reddit, LinkedIn communities, Google Plus communities, Let's Make Robots community, etc.

I hope to count with your support if you see the potential behind a development like HelloSpoon robot. 

You can follow HelloSpoon on Twitter(@HelloSpoon) and Google Plus (+LuisGIII).

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About the hardware used with HelloSpoon.

Why aren't using a camera? You know you can add sensors and find the bowl? No, really... why aren't you using a camera?

Ok, this is a question frequently asked and here's my response:

The reason to not add a camera or a bunch of sensors is because HelloSpoon is using a smartphone as main core. While some smartphones include a front-face camera others don't. So, is not a good idea rely in something that might be there or don't.

Also, the philosophy behind HelloSpoon is keep it simple and affordable. Yes, HelloSpoon is a lot of times cheaper than other solutions and that's how it should stay.

Continuing with the camera issue, do you know a way to interface an external camera with an smartphone that is easy to use by the user? Believe me I've been exploring that possibility since the very beginning because I dedicated the majority of my senior year in College to artificial vision algorithms but there's no way to interface an external camera with all the smartphones available without asking the user to do some work on their side.

If you know a way to implement it with all the smartphones available and that user doesn't need to interfere to make it work, then tell me :-)!

We need to take in count that for artificial vision algorithms there's a need of big processing power, if you know about artificial vision you understand what I'm saying. Plus, how we connect the camera to the smartphone? It should be wireless so the robot can keep the easy to use aesthetic and philosophy.

However, who knows? maybe in the near future it will be possible to implement and I will love to do it!  

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About the food.

Can I use any dish or bowl?

No. You might ask yourself but why?!

Here's the explanation:

Bowls and dishes are designed for us, we can move spoon anywhere inside the bowl and scoop for food without much problems in the most cases. What happens with HelloSpoon? Well, the motions of HelloSpoon are not as complex like ours so there might be times that he can't grab food if I use a normal bowl "made for humans".

Right now I'm using an slanted bowl because it concentrates the food in the middle of it, but that's not the ideal bowl.

Here's a drawing of the bowl that's going to be used with HelloSpoon:

Thanks to the bowl specifically designed for HelloSpoon (inspired in a frog), the food stays where the spoon can reach it all the time. 

Also is important to mention, that solid food must be chopped in small cubes so the spoon will be able to grab everything possible :-).

Chop the food? But they have upper limb difficulties... ?

Yes, they will need help to serve the food is not like they are living by their own and we know that's something normal. 

Children have their parents and elderly often have a nurse or a relative with them, so why they will need a machine to feed them? Ok, as I mentioned they are always with somebody... this is about give them independence and make them feel happy while doing it. Breakfast, meal and dinner time are very important times of the day, so why don't do something different and by their own next to their small robot assistant?

  I hope you can visualize the situation and start to see that it has sense :-). 

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QuickStart: How to start using HelloSpoon.

It's very easy, but let me show you what's the exact process step-by-step:

1.- Grab the blue carpet included with your HelloSpoon and unfold it on your table, next to your chair. Here's where you are going to put your HelloSpoon and the bowl.

2.- This is the place where you must put your HelloSpoon robot before start using it. Why? HelloSpoon moves to the bowl predefined position. It's predefined because one of the goals is keep HelloSpoon as affordable and simple as it can, so add cameras to the equation while it's more complex it will raise the price of the robot.

3.- Now you must the bowl included with HelloSpoon on the mark of the blue carpet. That's the direction and position of the bowl right now but it might change if the bowl is redesigned.

4.- Open HelloSpoon app on the smartphone.

5.- It's highly recommended that you go and check the settings screen before use HelloSpoon for the first time. Why? Well, here you can customize your experience with HelloSpoon robot.

You can: 

- disable/enable the music played on each scoop.

- disable/enable cheering after every bite.

- disable/enable the dancing of HelloSpoon when you finish your food.

- Change the voice of HelloSpoon from English to Spanish and vice versa.

All this features will be enabled by default because that's how it's intended to be the original HelloSpoon experience, but it's understandable that the users should be able to change all of this whenever they want.

6.- Ok, now you can click on the "HelloSpoon" button and the smartphone will start the process to connect with your HelloSpoon robot. Just be a little patient it tends to take a few seconds to initiate because it has to charge all the settings, libraries, sounds, etc.

7.- After clicking the button grab the phone and put it on the small gap behind the robotic trunk. Now just start to enjoy HelloSpoon :-)!

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HelloSpoon Evolution (Software)

There's a lot of work behind HelloSpoon app but basically this picture will show you the most important UI/UX evolution of HelloSpoon :-)!

You can download HelloSpoon main app clicking on the image, so you'll see how different it is right now :-)!

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HelloSpoon Evolution (Hardware)

As I mentioned in the introduction post there's a lot of work behind HelloSpoon, a lot of experiments were made before decide to go with the elephant design.

First it was a simple (and expensive) robotic arm with a spoon attached as end effector being controlled by voice commands using the good ( but not so good) speech recognition engine provided by Google.

Then it was evolving with the time to a very big elephant with fur, still using the same voice recognition engine and expensive arm but trying to interact with the user. It was still very unpolished and kind of awkward to see and talk.

The next step was pretty obvious, make the shell smaller. So it became very small in comparison with the first elephant design and still keeping the fur. 

The fur was a personal choice because I really liked how it looked but if it's intended to be a robot interacting with people and food, I guess fur is not the way to go. So, it was deprecated for the actual version :-).

What you see like "HelloSpoon" right now is the result of a lot of feedback from people all over the internet and different communities, THANK YOU!

There's a complete new design and philosophy behind hardware and software also, a completely new voice recognition engine known as PocketSphinx which works way better than the last one and it's offline! The motions are smoother than ever (but they can be improved).

It's basically the definitive HelloSpoon version.

It still looks like a DIY version but the final model that's going to be delivered to the people who trusts in me and HelloSpoon will be the same but using different materials :-)

Enough words!

You can click on the image and see how the robot was since the beginning :-) The evolution is amazing believe me!

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About myself and HelloSpoon development.

Hello everybody,

First of all, thanks for visit this blog entry! It will help you to know who I am, why I'm doing this and what's the goal behind HelloSpoon robot.

My name is Luis Samahi Garcia Gonzalez, I'm a recently graduated 23 years old Mechatronics Engineer from Mexico and I'm the developer, designer, programmer and crazy guy behind HelloSpoon robot.

I've had the chance to being fully involved into research projects related to Robotics and AI here in Mexico since I was 20 years old, like humanoid robots, house keeping robots, artificial vision for embedded systems and stuff like that non-related to industrial robotics.

Here's a link to my Youtube channel so you can take a look:

https://www.youtube.com/user/fokloiisx/videos

Also I had the chance to participate in International Robotics Competitions representing my country and winning some awards for autonomous humanoid robots categories.

Here's one picture from South Korea on IRC (International Robotics Contest) in 2012:

You might think oh that's cool! Why aren't you doing that anymore?

Actually I still do that (sort of) and it's named HelloSpoon :-)!

Why I decided to start to build a robot like HelloSpoon? At the time I started I was recovering myself of a wise teeth surgery and started to interest myself on rehab robotics.

I found little info about feeding machines and what I saw was not really interesting, also very expensive and it looked like a good challenge create something with the same core but innovate and create a robot never seen and unique at the same time. 

That's how HelloSpoon was born as a simple robotic arm in a wooden box and then it was evolving to become a supportive feeding machine, a cute companion. While I know it could not appeal to everybody, I knew that there's a place in the market for a solution like HelloSpoon. Actual solutions and HelloSpoon can perfectly coexist in the same environment because both reach users with different profiles. 

I knew that with my skills I could be able to create a robot, a robot friend to be more specific that can help people in need. And that's basically, how HelloSpoon was born 1.5 years ago here in my bedroom in Sinaloa, Mexico.

Let me share with you a few pictures of my workspace (my bedroom) where I've been working really hard to create an appealing enough solution that can interact with people. Sometimes you don't need a big laboratory to start something great don't you think? :-)

So that basically wraps up everything :-)!

Of course there's so much to say but this is the most important.

I hope you can feel that I'm capable enough to develop a robot like HelloSpoon, if I've been working for 1.5 years without any support or spotlight I guess it shows how decided I'm to make HelloSpoon a reality and a success.

YOU can help me to reach that, so it will be our victory and that will feel so much better that still doing it all by my own :-).

Thanks for reading! I hope you can donate and spread the word so more people will know and support this development!

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Saying Hello Spoon to everybody!

This is the first post on this little blog where you are going to be able to see more about HelloSpoon eventually.

Like:

Events

Stories and trips

Pictures of new ideas

And more!

Now this is being created exclusively for the crowd funding campaign!

If everything goes well, maybe you are going to be reading this with a big smile :-)!

Nice to meet you and I wish you a great day!