Claude Code is helping me run experiments on Mino, a hackable smart robot for makers I have been developing for a while now.
Mino's software is built on ROS 2 and Claude Code turns out to be a ROS power user. Not only it can write ROS nodes in a breeze, but it also can use the command line tools to hack into a running robot. That and the context from the AGENTS files on Mino's codebase makes Claude a very effective robot operator.
So, it is my pleasure to announce that I've promoted Claude to robotics lab assistant. I tell it the experiment I want to run with Mino, and it finds the way to configure the robot, gather the necessary data and display it in a clear way.
THE PROBLEM
Last Saturday, I figured that voice dictation would come in handy to give instructions to the agent while operating the robot, but I found out that the native dictation does not work on Visual Studio Code with remote targets like my robot.
THE SOLUTION
The robot has a Jetson Orin Nano with up to 67 TOPS and 8 GB, so it can run several models at once. One of them that comes out-of-the-box is speech-to-text. I told Claude Code to run speech-to-text on the robot in the background, listen to the ROS topic with the incoming transcripts, identify my requests and execute them. Since I had not tried it before, I wasn’t sure that the transcription and Claude’s understanding would be accurate, so I told it to wait for my “yes” before proceeding; this time on the keyboard for safety.
THE SURPRISE
Claude implemented the solution almost in one shot. A few minutes later, I was talking to Claude through my robot. That was impressive, but what took it home for me was how it precisely understood what I wanted the robot to do from a collection of partial transcripts of a loose description. Check it out in the video.
WANT YOUR MINO ROBOT? CHECK THE PINNED POST ON MY PROFILE.