Derek

Angry Derek
Assembled arm
GIF
Facial Expressions!
Some responses from Cohere API

Inspiration

This year is our last year at Hack the North. Ever since 2020++, we have competed as hackers, making all kinds of projects from NFT scanners to mind-controlled cars. This year, we wanted to celebrate the unsung heroes. The ones left forgotten even though they're the backbone of society itself. We've all watched the movie WALL-E, but how many of us remember M-O, the robot who sacrificed everything for his beliefs and morals? Who is praising him for staying steadfast in his pursuit of cleanliness? We present DEREK, the Dynamic Efficient Robotic Expert for Kleaning, the lone robot causing the downfall of the Roomba itself.

What it does

DEREK successfully identifies contaminants and dirt particles, and shows them that it is no match for a of the robot the likes of it. It is a fully autonomous system that effectively removes contaminants from your home (or spaceship) and keeps you and your family safe. But you don't want a boring robot, do you? DEREK adds to the overall cleaning experience with the utmost sass. Whether it be snarky comments or lively facial expressions, DEREK has it all.

How we built it

DEREK is a Raspberry Pi 4 at heart. Supporting that board and the peripherals is Viam (a tool we learned about at our last HTN!). This made startup fast but also introduced complexities into our project. On the RPi, we have Python running our emotion engine, sassy response generator, and all our control elements. We use Cohere to create snarky, sassy - and at times - angry responses to seeing so much dirt to clean up. The body is a multicolour of 3D prints, laser cut parts, and last-minute duct tape patches. Animated emotions are displayed on an ipad and changed to fit the spoken word.

Cohere

Cohere was awesome! We were able to run sentiment analysis and generation with their generative text APIs and then correspond that with emotions and animations we created to fit the scene. This helped us to create a more "human" like-robot and give DEREK some personality!

Challenges we ran into

We seemed to run into trouble wherever we went. From the simplest of problems to much more complex ones; we probably had every problem possible during our hack this year. We had power issues, motor shearing problems, infinite code bugs, and mechnical fit issues. But, each time that we did, we were able to solve it or pivot to a different solution.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of keeping up with the fun spirit of everything and pushing through all the challenges we ran into. We are especially proud of each other for the past years of school, friendship, and competitions. As it's our last year at UWaterloo, we wanted to make something fun, challenging, but more importantly, something we can do together.

What we learned

Test components early! Save yourself a lot of time by doing research anf giuring out what will work - if your components are even useable!
Have lots of fun while hacking. We picked a fun project so we could make others and ourselves laugh
Sponsors are reaaaaally cool. We kept going up to the sponsor bay to ask sponsors for technical help and the way that they instantly knew what to do was amazing.