Petoi's amazing community around the world never fails to amaze us. When Alexis Carella reached out to us on the Petoi forum with a question regarding Bittle X, we had no idea that the school project he was working on would soon be featured as an exceptional AI integration for Bittle X. In today's article, we'll learn how Alexis and Florian, two students majoring in Computer Science and Communication Networks from CPE Lyon, a specialized top-level educational institution in France, created Finobot — an advanced AI robot dog using Raspberry Pi, ROS2 and Python with Bittle X — and taught the robot to understand voice commands and follow humans around the room!
Alexis and Florian faced one major challenge while attaching a Raspberry Pi board on top of voice-controlled Bittle X: weight distribution. Particularly, their issue was with load distribution. Their modified Bittle X robot dog featured a camera instead of the Bittle X dog head, along with a Raspberry Pi microcomputer, a microphone, and a new battery composed of two 18650 cells.
The issue they ran into was load balancing: with the extra batteries, Bittle X seemed to fall under its own weight. This is when they reached out to our Petoi support forum:
With a little bit of fine-tuning, changing the angle of the servos, and adjusting the torque, this robot project Finobot was now ready to move smoothly! With that out of the way, our young researchers got to training the smart robot to respond to commands and follow the humans around.
Here is a video of the AI robot dog listening to commands, looking at the students, and following them around with the help of the camera using computer vision!
As you can see, Bittle's gait is corrected; it understands voice commands and takes prompt action based on the command. Alexis and Florian were kind enough to share their GitHub public project with us so that anyone can use their code and integrate it with Bittle X.
Here's another video demonstrating how the researchers assembled Bittle X:
As always, a huge thank you to these young researchers for elevating a simple robot science project into something that roboticists from all over the world can learn from and replicate. We're rooting for more projects from your team and can't wait to see what you have next!
Interested in stories just like these? Recently, we had Omer from Turkey use ChatGPT with Bittle to create a fully responsive robot pet that talks back to you! Click on the image below to read the full story:
