Sulla the Companion Robot Stands at Four Feet Tall — and Packs a Wealth of Sensors and AI Smarts
Built around an NVIDIA Jetson Nano, this four-foot bot includes offline conversational capabilities, mapping, object recognition, and more.
California-based Luft Systems has launched a crowdfunding campaign for Sulla, a companion robot standing four feet tall and packing a wealth of sensors — as well as, the company claims, artificial intelligence smarts capable of running entirely on-device with no internet connection.
"Sulla is build with practicality in mind. Her size lets her turn on light switches, and more importantly naturally interact with humans," claims Luft Systems' Erin Maddux. Not only is she tall, she's also smart. Sulla comes pre-equipped with an AIML-based chatbot, object recognition, face identification, motor feedback and over current protection, offline voice recognition and processing, area mapping, and more."
The heart of Sulla is, based on the specifications provided by its creators, an NVIDIA Jetson Nano — meaning it includes a 128-core Maxwell-based graphics processor, a quad-core Arm Cortex-A57 MPCore central processor running at up to 1.43GHz, and 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM. To this, Luft Systems has added a depth-sensing camera, forward-facing LIDAR sensor, four cameras tuned for facial and object recognition, five ultrasonic range sensors, two microphones, and an accelerometer.
To get Sulla moving, meanwhile, the robot's base includes two drive motors with 7,000 periods per revolution (PPR) encoders, and the main body includes eight metal-geared servos with 270° movement and position feedback resolution of around 0.5°. The software is based around an open-source robotics and AI stack including the Robot Operating System (ROS), Linux and OpenCV.
As Sulla rolls through a room, the robot is capable of automatically mapping the area — and of tracking the location of the bundled charging base. The robot is also claimed to teach itself about new objects autonomously, or can be triggered to learn a new object by voice command.
There's also on-board and fully-offline conversational processing, based around the AI Markup Language (AIML), using a dataset which grows by asking questions and storing the response. When left alone Sulla will seek out humans for conversation, the company claims.
Luft Systems is putting an aggressive price on the Sulla system: For the first week of the campaign, backers of the Kickstarter campaign in the US can pick up a unit with charging dock for just $720; a $1,688 reward tier, meanwhile, offers a robot plus a live programming course to lean how to customize the robot to a particular task.
More information is available on the project's Kickstarter campaign page, where physical rewards are expected to begin shipping in May this year.