Back in May, we teamed up with Nvidia to have a really fun contest involving AI and Robots. Titled “May the Fourth”, it was Star Wars themed, hoping for some smart droids using the Jetson Nano
The projects that came in were truly stunning and Nvidia has announced the winners! Head over to their blog for the full details, but for the impatient I’ll take a quick look at the winners.
John Ferguson and his 11 year old son took it upon themselves to bring a home made R2-D2 droid to life with the smarts of the Jetson Nano. You’ve probably seen plenty of R2 droids out there by now, but just check out this excerpt to see how impressive this bot really is.
A few components of the R2-D2 robot include Sabertooth Motor controllers, Sony cameras, two scooter motors, Arduino, NVIDIA Jetson Nano, a Muse EEG brainwave reader for an active periscope mechanism, and it is controlled with an Xbox 360 wireless controller. This project is a way for the Ferguson family to learn about AI, integrating NVIDIA Jetson Nano to activate R2’s vision-enabled object recognition capabilities and speech recognition.
Jim Nason’s bot, Robo Jango is a Mandalorian themed feature packed creation. Admittedly, it’s aesthetic may fit more in the world of fallout 4 than some Star Wars, but the feature set is truly out of this world.
RoboJango is surprisingly personable. It uses human-like movements and conversational AI skills, giving people in the room casual greetings, flexing its “muscles”, and spitting jokes. The RoboJango recognizes Jim’s family members, their pets, and harnesses object recognition capabilities by self-organizing to a DNN. This is done with several Arduinos, a battery matrix, customized software framework, and NVIDIA Jetson Nano as its brain.
Again, this is just a sample of the information available on these two impressive Star Wars themed builds. Go to Nvidia’s developer blog to learn more about them and find links out to their individual build logs.
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