It could appear to be a wierd thought at first, however when you consider it some extra, Ludic Worlds’ robotic design really makes a variety of sense. Ludic Worlds created a robotic that makes use of a Meta Quest 3 headset because the brains of the operation. And why not? These headsets are outfitted with highly effective processing items and a great deal of sensors that may deal with spatial mapping and positional monitoring duties with ease.
For the reason that headset handles a lot, the physique of the robotic is fairly fundamental. It was made with LEGO bricks, an L298N motor driver, DC motors, six AA batteries for energy, and an ESP32 improvement board to manage the motors. The headset merely rests on high of the robotic physique.
A better take a look at the parts (📷: Ludic Worlds)
The Quest 3 is in no way a hobbyist’s improvement board, so it was not designed for interfacing with exterior gadgets. You received’t discover GPIO pins or different such interfaces. Ludic Worlds bought round this limitation within the easiest method attainable by utilizing Wi-Fi to speak with the ESP32. This isn’t as quick as a hardwired connection, however for a comparatively slow-moving robotic, there isn’t sufficient delay to matter — particularly contemplating the choice to make use of UDP packets for communication.
Ludic Worlds’ plan was to offer easy spoken instructions to the robotic, then have it autonomously drive to the requested location. This was achieved by utilizing Whisper to transcribe the consumer’s voice. An utility developed with Unity then maps this location to a predefined spatial anchor within the room. The headset’s cameras and different sensors are then used to create a plan for navigating to the vacation spot. The navigational plan is translated into motor actions, that are transmitted to the ESP32 for execution.
Utilizing a Meta Quest 3 as a robotic controller could appear to be an odd factor to do, but it surely saves a variety of time assembling and debugging {hardware}. Try the video under to see this little robotic in motion.
