This Raspberry Pi rover bot is named Floyd and is super sassy, thanks to Chat GPT

Raspberry Pi
(Image credit: Larry's Workbench)

If one thing is for sure, the Raspberry Pi community can make some seriously cool robots. Today, we've got an example of another great robotic creation to share, this one from Larry over at the YouTube channel Larry's Workbench. Over the last month, he's documented the creation of his autonomous talking rover, Floyd, which uses our favorite SBC, the Raspberry Pi, as its main board.

Thanks to the integration of ChatGPT, Floyd is given the gift of gab. With it, Floyd is able to listen for input and come up with custom responses on the fly. This is demonstrated in the latest episode Larry shared, in which Floyd interjected to join the conversation partially through the video, completely unprompted.

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Floyd has quite a body to play around with, as far as Chat GPT robots go. It can locomote thanks to a set of wheels and even has an arm that can move around. However, the microphone and speaker take the bot to the next level, allowing for both speech-to-text and text-to-speech interactions.

According to Larry, Floyd's main board is a Raspberry Pi 4B. It's aided in part by a HAT, which handles some of the external components, like servos, used to operate the wheels and arms. The body appears to be made of metal, with the hardware fully exposed and mounted to the outside.

(Image credit: Larry's Workbench)

Floyd relies on ChatGPT 4, which runs on Raspberry Pi OS. This can easily be set up with the official Raspberry Pi imager, which we cover in our guide on how to set up a Raspberry Pi for the first time. That said, you should check out the project videos from Larry's Workshop for more information on the project's software side.

If you want to see this Raspberry Pi project in action, check out the official Larry's Workshop channel on YouTube.

Ash Hill
Contributing Writer

Ash Hill is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware with a wealth of experience in the hobby electronics, 3D printing and PCs. She manages the Pi projects of the month and much of our daily Raspberry Pi reporting while also finding the best coupons and deals on all tech.