Engineer Manager Goran Vuksic has created a 3d printed Star Wars Pit Droid that uses an NVIDIA Jetson kit as its brain. NVIDIA’s Jetson product line has been well-established among builders, engineers, tinkerers, and students, for its diverse and powerful capabilities. Goran is a Jetson AI specialist and member of NVIDIA’s Inception developer program as the CTO/founder of syntheticAIdata, and received a Microsoft AI MVP award. As a fan of Star Wars, he saw the Pit Droid, seen many Star Wars films and recent Disney+ series, as the perfect project for demonstrating NVIDIA’s AI Edge AI technology.
From Goran (via NVIDIA):
“Watching Star Wars and other films, I imagined how robots might be able to see and do stuff in the real world,” said Vuksic.
The engineer manager has posted detailed building instructions on Hackster that include links for the 3d-printing STL files, and programming code for the $499 Jetson developer kit. Goran noted that he did not own a 3d printer and after purchasing the files he opted for a 3d printing service to create the parts. Once they arrived he proceeded with the finishing process of sanding, painting, and assembly. He’s also provided a couple of videos showing some basic servo and object detection testing.
From Goran (via NVIDIA):
“My favorite part of the project was definitely connecting it to the Jetson Orin Nano, which made it easy to run the AI and make the droid move according to what it sees,” said Vuksic.
Goran Vuksic took the droid on tour to conferences in Europe where he and his friend Sherry List showed off how the droid works.
From Goran:
“At conferences Azure Lowlands (Utrecht, Netherlands) and Techorama (Antwerp, Belgium), my friend Sherry List and I presented the Pit Droid and how it works. Special thanks go out to the conference organizers and audience at our session for their interest in this project!
I hope this project inspired you and that you learned something new about computer vision and IoT! If you decide to build a droid like this, don’t hesitate to reach out if you have some questions.
Don’t forget to recycle your droids, save the galaxy!”