Home Pet Robot

Hello, I'm building an Arduino home robot that acts as a pet - looks cute, roams around the house, plays ball, chase, hide-and-seek, demands your attention, patrols the house, plays with the house cat, and keeps itself busy.

I have designed this robot to be advanced, but simple and very affordable for everyone. It has an ESP32, a 360° laser scanner, a voltage converter and two motors - quite simple. I entire body is 3D printed.

I've succeeded making the robot map the house and self-drive using the map (thanks to ROS2). The entire project is all open source and I have created videos with step-by-step build and bring-up instructions.

Briefly, the robot works like this - the robot's ESP32 captures the laser scanner data over a serial connection and forwards the distance data to a local Windows PC for processing. The local Windows PC runs ROS2 pre-packaged into a Docker image for easy installation. The Windows PC computes a map of your place and self-drives your robot by sending navigation commands back to the robot's ESP32. The ESP32 converts those commands into motors speed settings.

I also use an old smartphone (or a WiFi tablet) to display an animated face. The handset's color camera, speakers, microphone and IMU connect to the local Windows PC for object recognition and communication purposes. The ROS-based software platform that performs the robot control and data processing is called Kaia.ai.

I have designed 3 robot models. They use same software, but differ in their body size. Loki has a 200mm base - small enough to be 3D printed on most popular 3D printed. Fido is the mid-size robot with a 250mm base and Snoopy is the large robot with a 300mm base.

I hope this is interesting for many Hackster.io readers. Please keep in mind that this project is in active development.

I will be publishing more educational videos over time - including how it works and how to program it.

Please follow me and my project

• on the web https://makerspet.com (hardware) and https://kaia.ai/ (software)
• in the Facebook group 3D Printed Home Robots
• on Twitter https://twitter.com/makerspet/
• on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/3dPrintedHomeRobots/
• on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/makerspet_com/
• This is the current schematic - but always check for the latest version as the project evolves! https://github.com/makerspet/makerspet_snoopy/blob/humble/kicad/esp32_breakout/output/esp32_breakout_schematic_113023a.pdf
• This is the current Arduino firmware - but always check for the latest version! https://github.com/makerspet/makerspet_loki/tree/humble/arduino/loki-esp32
• This is the Docker image https://hub.docker.com/r/kaiaai/kaiaai-ros-dev/tags

Here are some illustrations of this project