Abo - The Able Bot

Inspiration

Smart home devices like Alexa and Google home are limited by their physical design, they can't move! We wanted a smart home assistant that can be your helpful companion where you are. We wanted to liberate these smart assistants from their boring tables and into your house, meaning you now have all the functionality of a smart home assistant but now always at an arm's length.

What it does

Abo is a mobile smart home assistant dock that follows you around and helps with daily tasks. Abo has some intelligent functions itself, it follows the user around and can be anything from a virtual pet sitter/ pet toy to message relay across the house. We can add as many functions to it as the users can imagine using Alexa skills and Google home actions. Abo can also learn user behavior by itself and be proactive.

How we built it

We used a MakeBot rover kit and as starting point and then added a raspberry pi zero wireless to it. We are using Python Flask to create the API to interact with Alexa and forwarding it using ngrok while it's locally hosted.

Challenges we ran into

Lack of hardware. We had very limited hardware available on hand which restricted the scope of our final product, we would have loved to add computer vision to Abo but couldn't because we didn't have any cameras. We only had one battery pack so we are only able to power either the rover or the screens at this point and the speakers also have separate batteries.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Abo is able to follow the user, do some tricks, play music, and act as a virtual home assistant. Also, it looks pretty cute.

What we learned

Our team consists of beginners at robotics and hardware so we were able to learn a lot about Arduino, circuits, and other hardware through this project. We also learned about Amazon Alexa skills.