Month: May 2021

Teardown of Naobot AI robot

zlite

I backed the Naobot AI robot on Kickstarter, and actually got two of them (the first was defective, so they sent me another). So I took apart the defective one to see how it works inside. Overall, it looks very well done.

Right now it’s mostly useful as a programming platform, using Scratch in its mobile app. The built-in “AI” functions, such as follow a person or animal, don’t work very well. But on the hardware side, it’s quite impressive.

Here’s what’s inside:

All the “brains” are in the board in the head that includes the camera, the processor and the wifi board

Here’s a close-up of that board
Inside the arm are motor gearboxes for each joint
Each gearbox has the usual motor, gears and a potentiometer or encoder to measure position
Here’s a close-up of the wheel encoders
The motor train is well-designed and has wheel encoders on both tracks
Here’s the gear train for the “fingers”
This one rotates the “wrist”
An close-up of the potentiometers that close the loop for motor movement
This is the “elbow” joint