This Robot Will Follow Your Beer Around

For lazy, middle-aged dudes around the globe — a group I’m looking forward to joining— the ultimate robot is one that can fetch you an ice cold crispy boy from the fridge whenever you need to wet your whistle. YouTuber Les Wright’s beer bottle-following robot doesn’t quite reach that goal, but it is a step in the right direction.

In a series of three videos on his channel, Wright demonstrates this little rover robot’s obsession with beer bottles. Mechanically, the robot is a tank-style rover built on a chassis from DFRobot. If a beer bottle enters the robot’s line of sight, it will turn to center on the bottom. If the bottle is far away, it drives closer. If it’s too close, it backs up a bit. If it can’t see the bottle at all, it will turn and scan the room until it finds it.

As you’d expect, this robot’s beer-seeking capabilities rely on computer vision — OpenCV, to be exact. That’s running on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ paired with a camera module and an Intel Neural Computer Stick 2. The latter component provides the extra oomph necessary for the Mobilenet-SSD Model computer vision code to run at a decent frame rate.

That code was written by Wright, and is available over on his GitHub page if you want to give it a try. Admittedly, there isn’t a whole lot of use for a beer-chasing robot if it can’t open a fridge to find that beer and bring it back to you. But, this is really just a demonstration of the versatility of computer vision, and could easily be adapted to non-alcoholic endeavors.