Building a Voice-Controlled Robot with Kotlin and LLMs
Building a Voice-Controlled Robot with Kotlin and LLMs Introduction Natural-language interfaces can make robots easier to operate. Instead of selecting individual buttons, an operator can say commands such as asking a robot to move, inspect an area, or report its status. In this tutorial, we will design an Android application that captures speech, sends the text through an LLM-based command…
Voice-Controlled Robot: Kotlin, LLMs, and Android
Voice-controlled robots can be operated more intuitively by allowing users to issue commands using natural language. In this tutorial, we will create an Android application that leverages Kotlin and Large Language Models (LLMs) to process voice commands, validate them, and translate them into actions for a robot.
Architecture Overview
The system consists of several components working together:
Android voice input using speech-recognition APIs
Command modeling with strict data structures
LLM intent parsing to convert natural language into structured commands
A validation layer to ensure commands are safe and within robot capabilities
A robot gateway to translate validated commands into ROS 2 messages
Feedback from the robot in the form of status updates
Handling ambiguity in natural language input
Choosing between local or cloud-based LLM and speech recognition
Safety architecture with deterministic control loops
Testing procedures for both simulated and physical deployments
The key idea is to use LLMs for high-level interpretation and planning, while deterministic software components handle the safety-critical aspects of robot control.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.