The dawn of the robotic era is at our doorsteps. Machines can now perform some of our housework and communicate with us on a daily basis. Moreover, big companies are already testing robots for tasks such as delivery.
All this robo-presence around us surely incites curiosity in some people to pursue programming their own robot. One company that has some robot AI history called Ohbot brings us Picoh, a little robot you can program and design to have its own personality.
via GIPHY
Say Hello To Picoh
Standing at only 10 cm (around 4 inches) tall, Picoh is basically a robotic head. It has expressive pixelized eyes, a touch-sensitive nose, and a movable mouth. Its Arduino board sends and receives messages from your device and plugs into additional sensors.
The eyes can provide a range of expressions and animations which are fully customizable via a programmable LED matrix on a 16×9 display. The nose allows Picoh to feel the outside world, while the mouth can smile and move when talking. On top of that, the robot’s base changes color to reflect its emotions. It also allows Picoh to nod and rotate its head from side to side.
Picoh’s programmable personality allows you to create a unique little robot with almost limitless customization options. Picoh’s “brain” is stored on an AI-enabled cloud, letting you access a range of machine learning and AI capabilities.
Through the purpose-built Ohbot app, anyone can leverage real-time block programming to personalize Picoh using the modified Ohbot Python library. Not only that, but Picoh is currently capable of understanding and speaking 4 languages aside from English.
The project has currently been successfully funded on Kickstarter just last May 2019. They are currently taking orders if you want to try your hand in programming your own Picoh.
YouTube: Your New Personal Robot AI for Coders
Photo credit: All images used are owned by Ohbot and were provided for press usage.
Sources: Ohbot / Picoh Kickstarter
