Option A: A simple desk assistant with a friendly face
Option B: A mobile robot companion to follow me around and entertain my cats
For either, I ideally want the following:
Speech recognition
AI integration for chatting/research/home automation
A friendly human voice a la Jarvis
I’m leaning towards option B.
I can certainly design and 3D print my robot buddy’s body. But should he have wheels? Motorized Legs? Could I make him airborne to float around next to me like a drone (and how noisy would THAT be?). You know what…I kind of do want it to have flight capability.
Should I add sensor modules for temp and humidity? Or should I pull that info from the web instead via some API integrations?
So many questions.
I’m thinking the brains of the operation should be a 16gb CM5 interfaced with Arduino boards, like an Uno R4, handling the mechanical components and movement. I already have gyros, hall effect sensors, lasers, etc to handle object detection and give the little guy some sight. Should probably just invest in some of the newer vision modules.
Curious if any of you have attempted anything similar or know of other projects I can piggy back off of. What else would YOU love to see a robot buddy do? Would love to brainstorm a little!
I wanted to make a bot thath follows me around and insults me like Glados back in the day. This was before AI and IOT were a thing so it was just going to be packed with sensors and work like a Roomba.
The thing that made me give up was 3D printing gears and align the wheels and the servos
Anyway I still have some sketches and a half assembled skeleton in my boxes
I actually had a pretty cool system for the eye, it was 2 axis mounted lazer pointer behind a diffuser sheet and a glass lens. I must have a video somewhere.
It could move fast so you could draw shapes and letters with it too
Do what any wise engineer would do, Cheat. Specifically start with something that already has most of what you need in a well built package.
I recommend starting with an electric wheelchair. They’re super expensive new, but if you need one, insurance or medicaid pretty much gives it to you (assuming you’re U.S.A.). So when they’re no longer needed they end up either junk, in the engineering school pile of parts, or go on battlebots.
Plus those things are designed to run trouble free day after day while carrying 350 lb loads.
Some words of warning, expect to junk the hand controlls. You will also probably need new batteries (SLA). And finally, even though they’re nearly worthless because they tend to be medicaid funded, people often look up the list cost when a family member no longer needs it, and assume that’s a starting point to assess it’s value.
If you’ve nerd-ish friends ask around. For example I have one stashed in a storage shed for me to do something with someday. If you were close enough, it’d be yours for the asking. Just cause you want to do something cool with it.
Put knobby tires on it, and it could totally follow you around the yard with a minifridge full of the beverage of your choice. Imagine yelling “Yo, beer me!” in front of your neighbors and it hustles over with a cold one.
I’ve settled on and started printing a design for my assistant. This is Deep Thought from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (film version). I’ve decided for now to leave her on the desktop as a static entity, but I’ve made cutouts for the eyes and the mouth to add LED strips that light up when she talks. Most of the electronic components are going inside the ‘head’ and any cables flow down the neck and out of a series of holes in the base. She’ll have two tiny PC speakers to talk with (some of the scars around the head will hollow for sound to travel) and a USB microphone input to listen to commands/wake words/etc.
Right now, I’m making it simple. I’m incorporating a DAC hat (sound) and NVME hat (storage) on an RPi 5 and loading up Home Assistant with custom wake words and a custom “depressed middle-aged British woman” voice to match the voice from the film. Trying to find ways to either 1. train an AI assistant to run offline or 2. connect the device remotely to my main PC with better hardware to drive the AI assistant. Not super sure yet.
Uh oh… that’s not right… Deep Thought only output the answer 42… it just took so long to produce that the society in question had aged generations and the question itself was forgotten.
well sort of. The highly advanced and interdimensional mice who built the computer never bothered to come up with a specific question originally. They built deep thought as a giant super Computer to calculate the answer, but never actually gave deep Thought the question. So, they employed Slartibartfast to design a custom planet, whose entire life system and functions would be used to calculate the ultimate question. I think it’s in the third book that Douglas Adams writes in the preface how a young girl finally came up with the actual question, but before she could tell anyone the Vogons destroyed earth, and so the output was lost forever.
yep. I think my one of my favorite prologues, which I think was in the second book the restaurant at the end of the universe, is when they discover God’s final message to his creation.
