Jarvis -- Desktop AI Assistant

Introduction

As one of the four Robotics Officers for UCD Electrical & Electronic Engineering Society 2025-26, I led a weekly robotics project focused on developing a desktop AI assistant and companion robot, named Jarvis as a homage to the Iron Man films. The goal was to build a small robot that could behave like a general AI assistant while also having its own physical presence. Jarvis can listen and speak to users, respond through an AI agent, be controlled remotely, and receive movement commands directly through voice. It also includes a pre-programmed dancing mode, a local facial recognition model, and a sentinel mode that allows it to distinguish between familiar faces and strangers when its owner is not at home.

Highlights

• Built around a Raspberry Pi 5 as the main processing unit, with a touchscreen and camera module connected through the Pi's DSI and CSI interfaces, and a ReSpeaker microphone module and loudspeaker connected through USB for speech input and audio output.
• Designed the power system using a battery stack with an integrated converter and battery management system, communicating with the Raspberry Pi over I2C. Four geared DC motors are driven through a motor driver controlled by the Pi's GPIO pins, with a separate 5Ah, 50C battery for high-power motor supply.
• On the software side, Jarvis runs on 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS with OpenClaw used locally as a smart hardware manager and system-level AI agent, connected to the OpenAI API for language model capabilities.
• Integrated WhatsApp connectivity allowing communication with the robot either by speaking to it directly or by messaging it remotely from a phone.

Tags

Videos

Gallery