hi stranger, a build story, for the team at .
TARS is the sarcastic robot from Interstellar. Mine is smaller, falls over more, and looks a lot like me. Its humor is set to 75%. Turn the dial down if you only want the facts.A 3D-printed TARS robot with a motion sensor I soldered in, a walk worked out by Claude, a Beyond Presence avatar for a face, and a stack that runs locally on a Mac. 100%? brave.
Humor setting
I had spent two years building with AI, all of it safely behind a screen. Then I wanted to try hardware. I started from an open-source TARS with a 3D-printed body, added my own ideas for how it moves and what it senses, and held a soldering iron for the first time in my life.Two years into building with AI, I wanted to try hardware. Base: an open-source TARS project with a 3D-printed body. Added: my own ideas for motion and extra sensors.
The motion sensor went in. Nobody had warned it.I soldered in a motion sensor. It was my first time using a soldering iron.
Built on TARS-AI, an open-source community project, and so is the 3D model on this page. Based on the mechanical puppet designs by Christopher Nolan, Nathan Crowley and the production team who first brought TARS to life in Interstellar; miniaturised CAD by Charlie Diaz, with modifications by the TARS-AI Community (CC BY-NC 4.0). Mine is a fan-made build.
Walking on two slabs is harder than the film makes it look. So TARS taught itself to walk. Well, Claude did the experimenting. TARS did the falling.It kept falling over when it walked. Claude experimented with the motion until it found a walk that stays up.
Many tries later it walks, and it stays up.Result: it walks without falling.
My day job is real-time avatars at Beyond Presence. So mine got an actual human face, and the nearest human was me. Yes, it is slightly unsettling. No, I’m not sorry.The face is a Beyond Presence real-time avatar of me, driven by an agent. It uses our avatar technology and what I learned building agents. handsome robot, no?
A robot that is always on is a robot that is always billing you. Keeping it running was super expensive, and the avatar was the hardest, priciest part. So the goal changed: run everything on my Mac, for free.Keeping it running all the time was expensive. The avatar was the hardest and costliest part. New goal: run the whole stack locally, at no cost. my wallet says hi
Free, private, and offline where it counts. One piece still phones home. Nobody’s perfect. It can also control my appliances, which is either convenient or the first act of a film.Everything else runs locally on a Mac, free and private. It can also control home appliances.
I posted the build on LinkedIn. It travelled further than anything I had posted before.The LinkedIn post about the build is my most-read post.
What it proved at workOur Beyond Presence avatar model is efficient enough to run on a local machine, fully offline. That opens up a lot for on-prem setups.
A demo is cheap. A thing that runs all day is not. The bill is what pushed me to the better design.
The part I assumed needed a data centre, the avatar, runs on the Mac on my desk.
Begin with an open-source project, and let an AI run the experiments.
