Robotic News: Desk Robot Gets Sassy With GIFs; Creator Shares Details Online So People Can Make One Too!

Working on a desk job for eight hours a day could sure get boring. Thankfully, an NYU student created a desk robot that gets sassy with GIFs when it communicates with people. The best part is all the details on how to create one's own desk robot are shared online!

Meet Peeqo. It is a desk buddy robot that communicates only with GIFs. Peeqo was created by Abhishek Singh, an NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program student, for his thesis project. According to Abhishek Singh, Peeqo is like the love child of Amazon Echo and a Disney character.

On his imgur page, Singh details the design and development of Peeqo from a concept to the real sassy GIFs-communicating robot. He started off with details on the initial design of Peeqo. One of the design constraints that Singh needed to meet was that Peeqo should be compact and small enough as it will have to be displayed on a desk.

The final design was then modeled through Autodesk Fusion 360. In order to fully express the emotion from the GIF, Singh added movements to the design of Peeqo. The initial prototype featured a sawed-tennis ball on a wooden rod. Eventually, Abhishek Singh decided on using a Stewart Platform to make the movement more fluid and natural. The Stewart Platform also enabled Singh to connect the Peeqo's head on top of the platform and hide the electrical wires and its customized components inside the Stewart Platform's body.

The final design of Peeqo has a cylindrical shaped body with flexible covering for movement. On top of the body is a head with an LCD monitor. Peeqo is also equipped with six servo motors, four microphones, a camera, a USB speaker, two Arduino Mini micro-controllers and a Raspberry Pi micro.

Peeqo is able to respond, thanks to the use of voice recognition programs from Google Speech API and API.ai. The DIY robot also has a Chrome extension that will monitor and scolds its user when it strays from being productive from work (like checking Facebook while on the clock).

Abhishek Singh is also developing Peeqo to be a mini-speaker with built-in Spotify integration. The code for Peeqo will soon be shared by Singh online, so hard-core DIYers can have a hand making their own Peeqo.