Hackaday reports on a Pi-based personal assistant robot  built by Saral Tayal.

The robot listens to his voice and recognizes his face.

The body of the robot is the “Rover 5” platform, to which Saral added a number of 3D printed parts.

A forklift-like sled gives the robot the ability to pick things up.

The Logitech webcam up front feeds images are fed to machine learning models, while audio is processed to listen for commands. This robot can find and pick up 90 unique objects.

The robot’s brains are a Raspberry Pi. It uses TensorFlow for object recognition.

Some of the models Saral is using are so big that the Pi could only manage a couple of frames per second at 100% CPU utilization. A Google Coral coprocessor sped things up quite a bit, while only using about 30% of the Pi’s processor.

It takes several motors to control to robot’s tracks and sled. This is handled by two Roboclaw motor controllers which themselves are commanded by the Pi.

The design is open source. The code and 3D models are on his GitHub repo.