Project Bruno

“Bruno: A buddy that learns, protects, and cares for the planet.”

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Inspiration

We have always been fascinated by robots and their ability to solve problems that haven’t been solved before. Project Bruno was born out of this curiosity and passion. Our goal was to design a robot that not only helps with learning and safety, but also contributes to sustainability in everyday life.

What it does 🤖

Bruno is a smart mobile robot that:

1.Provides surveillance with obstacle avoidance and face-tracking. 2.Acts as a chat buddy who can teach math, physics, and language. 3.Follows people for companionship and learning interactions. 4.Has a future vision of sustainability , detecting and collecting plastic bottles to promote recycling.

How we built it 🛠️

Hardware: Raspberry Pi 5, mecanum-wheel chassis, ultrasonic sensors, and a camera module. Software: Python, OpenCV and groq/meta maverick for computer vision, GPT OSS for chat, and Flask servers for streaming/control. Approach: Built in stages, first obstacle avoidance, then face-tracking, then interactive teaching and environmental tasks.

Challenges we ran into 🚧

  1. Obstacle Avoidance: Filtering noisy ultrasonic data and ensuring smooth navigation without collisions.
  2. Building Hardware: Aligning mecanum wheels and wiring sensors correctly required patience and repeated calibration.
  3. Understanding Limits: Running AI, video, and motor control on the Raspberry Pi 5 required code optimization and performance trade-offs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 🏆

Successfully integrated hardware and AI into a single working platform. Created a robot that can both teach and protect. Built a foundation for sustainability features that go beyond typical robotics projects.

What we learned 📚

How to integrate sensors, motors, and AI into a unified system. The importance of optimizing for hardware limits. Designing interactions that make robots both functional and engaging.

What's next for Project Bruno

Creative Interaction: storytelling, games, and activities that spark curiosity and imagination.

see : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dx7qyQs0KNI . This needs to be integrated with Bruno along with hardware integration of giving him a display.

Our immediate next step is to make Bruno a plastic bottle picker, detecting bottles, moving toward them, and placing them into a recycling bin. This milestone pushes Bruno from being just a learning and safety robot to one that actively supports sustainability. Looking ahead, we see Bruno growing capability by capability, without being restricted to any single domain. Some future directions include:

Home Assistance: simple tasks like fetching small objects, reminders, or helping with chores.

Healthcare Support: monitoring wellness, detecting emergencies like falls, or providing companionship.

Exploration & Mapping: navigating new environments, building maps, and adapting to dynamic spaces.

Community & Collaboration: serving as a platform for developers and educators to create new modules and share use cases.

The vision is for Bruno to evolve continuously, adding new abilities step by step, becoming not just a robot but a versatile companion that can adapt to the needs of its users and community.

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