Book Reader and Page Turner Robot using Raspberry pi

Abstract

People who are unable to read texts, like people suffering from visual impairments, need to get new information from books and other written sources for educational purposes and entertainment. Although there are some audiobooks that they can listen to, there is still an abundance of books that they might need, which are hard to digitize mainly because of copyright issues. Therefore, there is a real need for using technology to help facilitate the reading process of a wide range of books and written material to help this group of people to overcome their reading difficulties. To solve this problem, a robot that can read and turn the pages of the book is proposed in this project. The reading process is carried by capturing the book pages and extracting the text from the captured image. Then, the text is converted into a speech which can be heard via a speaker. After finishing reading each page, the robot will turn the page using a wheel and arm, using different software and hardware components. The reading robot described above is expected to read specific types of books and, thus, help various people who have reading difficulties gain access to the informational content and entertaining content included in books and written material.