Will Cogley's Coglet Is a 3D-Printable, Expressive, Twin-Camera Companion Bot

Maker Will Cogley is crowdfunding for an open source, 3D-printable companion robot programmable in Python and with online and offline operating modes: the Coglet.

"We believe robots should be expressive and full of life, not just minimalist shells and monochrome screens," Cogley says of the inspiration behind his semi-eponymous companion bot. "Coglet is a robotics kit for those of us who grew up with WALL-E, R2-D2 and Baymax — robots that communicated through movement, mechanics, and personality. Coglet combines intricate mechanical design, expressive animation, and modern electronics into a single maker kit. Unlike other screen-based assistants, Coglet moves, reacts, and behaves with life and personality."

The platform underpinning the expressive Coglet offers a total of nine degrees of freedom, though is designed as stationary desk-bound companion rather than an ambulatory roving robot: its eyes, ears, mouth, and eyelids all move under programmatic control, along with its head via neck roll and pitch and base yaw. Designed, Cogley says, as a mechanical project as much as an electronics one, this is all handled by a series of 16 gears and a total of 60 3D-printed parts.

Inside the robot's shell is a custom control board dubbed the CogNog, with two microcontrollers: a Raspberry Pi RP2040 driving the device's nine servos plus an optional 10th and handling animation tasks, and an Espressif ESP32-S3 communications coprocessor delivering Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) connectivity along with audio input and output capabilities. Each eye, meanwhile, has its own smart camera embedded: one is a Seeed Studio Grove Vision AI Module V2 running pre-trained face, person, and object detection models on-device with the option of supporting custom models locally, while the other is linked to the ESP32 for streaming video or outputting to a cloud service via the open source XiaoZhi AI platform for more power-hungry analysis.

Cogley is funding the project on Kickstarter, with physical rewards starting at £25 (around $33) for a CogNot board, speaker, and microphone, £125 (around $167) for all but the 3D-printed parts, or £250 (around $334) for a full kit; all hardware is expected to ship between August and September this year, though as with all crowdfunding campaigns that's not a guarantee. "Although all of our planned features are working," Cogley says of the plan for fulfillment, "we plan to speed things up and make a few more mechanical tweaks so that Coglet can be quieter, more robust and easier to assemble."

Files for the current prototype, meanwhile, are available on GitHub under an unspecified license.