Overview
A reusable control stack written for a retro-styled home robot — in the lineage of the Tomy OmniBot, Heathkit HERO and Arctec Gemini — built on an iRobot Create 2 base with a Raspberry Pi + Hailo-8 brain. The point is reuse: the hard parts live in the stack, so bringing up a different robot is mostly a new config file.
How It Works
It’s layered, with an async publish/subscribe bus gluing everything together:
behaviors wander / follow / patrol / dock / greet (deliberate) reflexes bump / cliff / wheel-drop evasion (reactive) arbiter who gets the motors, by priority drivers create2 base, camera, detector, voice, MCUs, arm bus async pub/sub topics
An optional brain — scripted rules, or a Claude API cortex — sits on top and nudges the robot at low priority. Crucially, safety never depends on it: the reflex layer out-prioritizes the brain.
Try It (no robot required)
A built-in simbot runs the whole stack against a simulated robot. Point a browser at the local server and you get a green-phosphor control room with a live camera, world map, sensor panel, joystick and behavior picker.
Current Status
The control stack and the simbot control room are running; the physical target is the Create 2 build.