Final Project: Leo

Leo is a project that I have been planning for many months now and my project will be a first version of it. Leo is a home assistant droid that can be purposed for simple needs around the house. Most home assistant robots tend to fall in the gimmicky / not useful category, but leo will be a platform that can be upgraded over time to suit custom tasks. For example, an early task may just be to travel to each room, measure the temperature / humidty and communicate to open the home's electric windows to open and close as needed. It might also have a speaker onboard and follow you around with music, it might be given a camera to be able to monitor the home remotely.

For this Fab Academy project, I wish to atleast get the drivetrain going, and a simple body ontop, maybe with a touchscreen and some simple sensors. It will use mecanum wheels to give it incredible mobility, and a suspension system that will alow it to lower and raise each leg (the suspension system was inspired by this James Bruton robot). Part of the project is to give it a personality. A touch screen with a face, coupled with the ability to manipulate each suspension arm to dance around with, should give it enough to express some sort of personality.

The project is a lot less involved than it seems and getting a basic chassis going is straight forward, some 2020 extrusion, 3d printed parts, motor + drivers, servos and mecanum wheels. The body is an infinite scope creep project, but a simple implementation with a raspberry pi, 3d printed shell and touch screen is achievable. If time permits, maybe some basic computer vision or LIDAR navigation could be implemented.

My drawing is terrible so I have jumped the gun a little and gone ahead and modelled the chassis in onshape, it paints a clearer picture of it: