A small robot with a large system behind it#

Ainekio is an owner-built robot companion connected to MetaHuman OS. The current red-and-black body is small enough to sit on a workbench: four articulated legs, eight micro servos, a cyan OLED face, a camera, microphone and speaker hardware, an ESP32-S3 controller, and an open printed chassis whose wiring is still fully exposed. A separate enclosure revision is actively evolving around that working prototype.

The larger project begins behind that body. Ainekio has a machine-checkable wire protocol, a portable safety core, physical firmware, an authenticated gateway, an operator dashboard, a host emulator, a browser simulator, and an Environment adapter. MetaHuman OS supplies the conversation, model routing, work admission, environment reasoning, bounded task state, speech services, and autonomy policy.

This site documents both halves without pretending they are the same thing.

The system in one pass#

Human or bounded autonomous trigger
  -> MetaHuman Work Coordinator
  -> Environment Mode
  -> Environment Task State
  -> Environment Bridge
  -> Ainekio Environment adapter
  -> authenticated gateway
  -> protocol-v1 robot command
  -> portable body core and ESP32-S3 services
  -> motion, face, camera, microphone, or speaker
  -> correlated result or observation
  -> the same bounded MetaHuman task

Each arrow has a specific owner. The browser does not own the robot’s safety rules. The model does not generate raw servo angles for direct execution. The gateway does not decide whether an objective is semantically complete. A successful motor command does not prove that a visual goal was achieved.

Those boundaries are the core design, not incidental plumbing.

What “robot familiar” means here#

“Familiar” is the product direction: a small embodied presence that can listen, speak, look, move, and gradually participate in a shared environment. It does not mean the robot is a finished autonomous creature or that every service is always running.

The current design prefers:

semantic actions such as wave, bow, captureImage, or a bounded motion plan over free-form actuator output;
explicit capabilities, timeouts, cancellation, and fail-safe behavior over optimistic dispatch;
correlated still images over a continuous video feed to the model;
one canonical owner for admission, transport, execution, and completion;
local-first operation with authenticated boundaries;
evidence that says exactly what passed and what remains unproven.

The two repositories#

The Ainekio repository owns the body-side system:

Slave/ contains the printed-body assets, portable control core, protocol, generated motion/face/audio assets, and ESP32-S3 firmware.
Master/ contains the protocol gateway, operator dashboard, and authenticated MetaHuman Environment adapter.
Emulator/ contains the host body emulator, integration tests, and the Sesame visual simulator.

The MetaHuman OS repository owns the reasoning and orchestration side:

the Work Coordinator admits and tracks finite work;
Robot Operator schedules the robot-specific bounded autonomy children;
Environment Mode decides what the environment task should do next;
Environment Bridge owns the external connection and transport lifecycle;
Environment Task State owns correlation, step bounds, continuation, and the completion basis for an objective;
Whisper and Kokoro remain the speech recognition and synthesis owners.

The current test body began from the open-source Sesame robot, but Ainekio is not just a theme applied to upstream firmware. The controller, protocol, gateway, safety model, media paths, and MetaHuman integration have been replaced or expanded around Ainekio’s own contracts.

How progress is reported#

This project uses five different evidence levels:

Evidence	What it proves
Present in source	The implementation exists in its current owner.
Focused validation	A relevant contract, type check, audit, or unit test passed.
Runtime admission	The live system accepted the work through its real owner.
Terminal completion	The adapter or robot returned a correlated final result.
Physical or semantic proof	The actual body behaved correctly, or a fresh observation proved the real-world goal.

The lower rows cannot be inferred from the upper ones. A build is not a walk. A gateway connection is not autonomy. done is not automatically “the room is brighter now.”

Where the project stands#

As of August 27, 2026, the software path is broad and real. The physical controller has substantial bring-up evidence. The robot has executed physical motion and audio tests through the gateway. Camera, wake-word, speaker, and autonomy work all have concrete implementation and field evidence.

The assembled companion loop is still a prototype. Motion calibration, robust network behavior, wake-word false-trigger containment, microphone quality, speaker underruns, fresh-frame semantic completion, and repeated unattended autonomy acceptance remain active engineering work. A newer Robot Status workflow is also being developed in MetaHuman OS and is not presented here as a released feature.

Read Current Status for the dated evidence snapshot, then continue through the body, firmware, protocol, gateway, perception, voice, MetaHuman, and autonomy articles for the owner-by-owner view.