pixelbot

An Android- and Arduino-powered AI bot

Pixelbot is an AI robot that uses an Android device as a brain - the screen animates its face, the front-facing camera is its eye, and the speaker is its mouthpiece. The brain communicates with its body via Bluetooth to an Arduino-controlled set of servos and motors. A convolutional neural network (powered by TensorFlow) is used for object detection (trained on the COCO dataset). The robot tracks objects with it's head as well as body. The robot speaks and, well, thanks to the input from my 6 yr old, farts.

The robot is built with foam board on an Agent 390 base. I've used a Pixel 1 for the phone (hence the name!). An HC-06 Bluetooth module connects the phone to the Arduino. The head is mounted on a Mallofusa pan/tilt servo rig (but using Futaba S3003 servos). The phone attaches with Volport magnetic car mount.

Schematic diagram:

The Arduino code is contained in PixelbotBody.ino. The BluetoothArduinoBridge.java might be useful for other projects looking at using this setup of an Android as a powerful computer and Arduino for controlling hardware. Also CameraObjectRecognizer and the classes in the com.example.pixelbot.tensorflow package are a useful minimal implementation of object recognition with camera.

Have fun :) --Dave