As far as my technical background goes, I currently work designing, making, and maintaining interactive exhibits at a planetarium/science center. But over the years i've kind of tinkered with just about everything. Mostly on the fabrication side, woodworking, manual & cnc machining, 3d printing, resin and plaster casting, mold making, sewing, welding, etc. But I've also done some simpler robots, microcontroller projects, 3d modeling and animation. Recently i've stared learning some machine learning and experimenting with Isaac Sim.
I've been wanting to get more into robotics for my own purposes and to make cooler exhibits for my job. I want to eventually make a robot docent that can interact with guests. I'm going to start simpler with this build and try to put together a little lidar scanning droid that can make interior maps of buildings. I'm going to try and give it some basic llm functionality to carry out simple commands or be manually remote controlled from a steam deck. If I can get a decent floor plan and interior model out of it, it would be super helpful in setting up exhibits, my wife's architecture work, and compositing animations into live footage.
I do want to focus a bit of my effort on giving it some personality as well. Like how all the types of droids in star wars have a distinct personality type, and then variation from droid to droid. But that might be too much feature creep for this project. I'm going to focus on just getting a spherical lidar working first.
Excited to join the challenge and learn with you all!
#RoboticsDreamKeeper #RDKX5











