A robot Audio System

[Andrew Rudolph]

You could use smart chips so that you wouldnt need the robot to look for a barcode on the wall, lots of places use smart chips now they work some way i dont know, do some research.

You could use a vision recognition system like the CMU Cam

http://www.acroname.com/robotics/par...MUCAM-KIT.html

Also you could use a robot controller that is a single board computer, like the Via mini ITX robotics system

http://robots.net/article/983.html

Then you can have it access files stored on a hard drive and it would solve some of the issues you are having, maybe even just using an Mp3 player with your system in general. There are lots of websites about people building thier own Mp3 players im sure you can find somehing that will help you.

[Jeremy_Mc]

Following up on Andrew's post, using a full computer could also give you the advantage of some modern OCR systems for text recognition...who needs smart chips and bar codes when you can just read the title?

[velocipenguin]

Depending on how long each audio recording needs to be, you could use a Winbond addressable recorder chip (http://dkc3.digikey.com/pdf/T041/0301.pdf) to store the recordings and a microcontroller to trigger each message at the appropriate location. Distance measurement could easily be performed using encoders attached to your drive wheels.

[Justin Stiltner]

IF you were using an entire computer doing ocr you could use winamp to play mp3 files of what you want to say from a cd... and I would reccomend using line following to navigate, and watch for obsticals... such as ppl, little kids.. ect.

[Andrew Rudolph]

Yeah you definetly need to have some sort of obstacel avoidance system. you could set up a system of way points much like GPS systems work using encoders to constantly track the position of the bot. Maybe you could use one of the cye robots, they have a great waypoint system

http://www.personalrobots.com/