7" mini-robotic dog, programmed to be a personal companion robot
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Story:
I want to build robots that can accomplish useful tasks. As a high school student, most types of robots were inaccessible to me, so I built PiDog to be a personal companion robot for my siblings. To allow PiDog to speak and respond, I connected PiDog to AI with the OpenRouter API. I used an external USB microphone for better audio capture and ran the bulk of the program on my lap to increase the speed.
Specs:
- PiDog is a 7” Robotic Dog, Built with the Sunfounder Kit.
- Raspberry Pi 4, Sensors (Gyroscope, Ultrasonic, Touch, Camera, Sound Detection)
- Integrated with OpenRouter Models (Nvidia Nemotron, OpenAI GPT-OSS 120B)
- FastAPI, to run program on external lapbook
- PyAudio for Audio Capture, Vosk for STT, gTTS for TTS
Demostration:
Reflection:
The Build of the PiDog went relatively well aside from a few issues with Camera Connections. The programming gave me experience with AI integration, as I used open source AI to give the PiDog the ability to speak and respond. I also gotten to use FastAPI to run the program mostly on my laptop.