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Hey everyone,
I’ve been running HA for a few years and keep bumping into the same limitation: everything in my smart home is bolted
to the wall. Cameras only see their fixed angles. Sensors only cover the rooms they’re in. The vacuum is the only
thing that moves — but all it does is clean.
So I started a DIY project: a small wheeled robot with a camera and a robotic arm, connected to HA via MQTT. It has
solid autonomous navigation and obstacle avoidance — you can send it to any specific spot in your home, not just “go
to the living room” but “go to the side table next to the couch” level of precision.
The idea: a freely mobile camera + sensor + carrier platform you can control through HA automations.
Here’s what I’ve been using it for:
Patrol & monitoring (daily use):
- “Did I leave the stove on?” check — When my phone disconnects from home WiFi, an automation sends the robot to the
kitchen to snap a photo of the stove and push it to my phone. Sounds dumb, but I used to drive back home for this at
least once a month. - Plant health monitoring — Every morning it walks up to each plant, gets close for a good angle, takes a photo, and a
local VLM (Ollama) runs a health analysis. Yellow leaves, dry soil, pest signs — it pushes an alert if anything looks
off. Way better than fixed cameras since it can get right up to each plant. - Pet monitoring while away — My cat does weird things when I’m not home. The robot follows a patrol route and can get
into spots wall cameras can’t see — behind the couch, under the table. I get Frigate-style event notifications from
those angles. - Pre-arrival house check after vacation — Before I walk in after a trip, the robot does a full patrol: checks each
window up close, looks under sinks for leaks, checks if anything fell over. Sends me a report.
Carrying stuff (what the arm does):
- Pre-vacuum floor pickup — This is my most-used automation. 10 minutes before the vacuum starts, the robot does a
sweep and picks up socks, slippers, cat toys — drops them in a designated bin. Then the vacuum runs on a clear floor.
I used to bend over and pick everything up manually every time. - Bring in small packages — After the smart lock opens, the robot goes to the door and carries the package to the
living room table. Only handles under 1kg for now, but that covers about 80% of my deliveries. - “Where did I leave my keys?” mode — Triggered from the HA dashboard, it sweeps through rooms checking tabletops,
counters, couch cushion areas. Combined with LLM Vision, I can ask “where are my keys” and get an answer. Once found,
it walks over and brings them to me. (About 70% success rate on the grab — still tuning this, sometimes drops them.)
In HA it shows up as a few entities:
- camera.robot_main — live feed
- device_tracker.robot — which room it’s in
- button.robot_patrol — trigger a patrol run
- And some service calls:
- robot.go_to — go to a specific location (room name or coordinates)
- robot.take_photo — snap a photo at current position
- robot.pick_up — pick up the object in front of it
- robot.deliver_to — carry what it’s holding to a specified location
Tech stack is ROS2 → MQTT bridge → HA, navigation is SLAM + dynamic obstacle avoidance.
Questions for you all:
- If this were available as a HACS integration, would you install it?
- Which of the above scenarios would be most useful to you? Any use cases I haven’t thought of?
- What would be your biggest concern? (Privacy? Noise? Will the cat attack it?)
- If it can carry small items (under 1kg), what’s the first thing you’d want it to carry?
- How much would you pay for something like this?
Interested to hear what you all think.