Project Carro: A Custom AI-Powered Autonomous Vehicle

Carro is a custom built robotics project centered around a Raspberry Pi 5 mounted on a modified remote control car chassis. Dissatisfied with the restrictive and opaque proprietary software that came pre installed, I performed a complete system wipe and rebuilt the stack from the ground up using Claude Code. This allowed for an agentic hardware discovery process, where the AI dynamically identified the GPIO configurations for the motors, gears, and sensors. To facilitate control, I developed a custom dashboard hosted directly on the Pi that broadcasts upon startup, providing a real-time camera feed and a web-based interface for manual navigation throughout my home.

Beyond simple remote operation, Carro is equipped with a sophisticated interaction and navigation layer. It features local AI Speech to Text (STT) processing for low latency command recognition, paired with a high fidelity ElevenLabs voice for natural verbal communication. By integrating a local database, I’ve given Carro a persistent memory, allowing it to "recognize" family members and store spatial data as it maps the house. This project, which transitioned from a boxed toy to a fully autonomous, social robot in just a few hours, serves as a powerful demonstration of how modern LLM developer tools can drastically accelerate complex hardware integration and hobbyist robotics.