Meet Pico: A smart companion robot with vision

Drawing upon the design and behaviors of the BD-1 droid from Star Wars, Mateo of the YouTube channel MateoTechLab has adapted it into a shoulder-mounted animatronic named “Pico” that can constantly interact with the wearer.

All movement, sound generation, and lighting are handled by an Arduino Nano Every board embedded inside a custom 3D-printed enclosure. Its base features a micro servo motor that rotates the head up to 90 degrees in either direction, while one of the eyes can “blink” thanks to an LED protruding from it. Lastly, a piezo buzzer in the head creates little beeps as a way to get the attention of anyone nearby.

The code running on the Nano Every allows users to cycle through a total of three different modes. When set to active, the robot will perform small gestures with the servo motor, blink on occasion, and even play random noises. Pico can be further upgraded with an ESP32-CAM module to give it powerful computer vision capabilities when running certain models or even to simply function as a camera.

To see more about how Pico was built, watch Mateo’s video below and check out the project page on Thingiverse.