Friday

Friday is an indoor autonomous robot assistant designed for hospital environments, capable of responding to voice commands, navigating between rooms, and automating routine tasks such as delivering items and relaying information.

The system runs on a Raspberry Pi at its core, communicating with a cloud-based Node.js backend over MQTT — a lightweight pub/sub protocol well-suited to IoT. Voice commands are processed through a speech recognition pipeline and interpreted by a Generative AI layer (Gemini) to map intent to actions.

The React dashboard allows hospital staff to monitor the robot's status, queue tasks, and view a log of completed actions. The system is containerised with Docker to ensure consistent deployment across environments. Navigation is rule-based using a predefined hospital floor map, with obstacle detection via ultrasonic sensors.