A-BOT
A small desk companion, built around a long working day.
- Design and build
- 2023–2024
- Club president
- 2022–2025
- High-school prize
- Projet X 2024
After Gustave Motors, we had to decide what our engineering club would build next. I had spent a demanding year balancing school, chess competitions, websites and long days working on the car. I kept coming back to the same concern: we could work hard without noticing how tired we were becoming.
We wanted to explore a quieter project: a small companion that could stay on a student’s desk, notice aspects of their working environment and encourage better study habits. A-BOT grew from that idea.
A quiet companion
We wanted a friendly presence that could sit on a desk without interrupting someone’s concentration. The cat-shaped body, moving arms and expressive eyes made that idea tangible. Its purpose was to encourage us to pay attention to our working habits.
Making it more autonomous
Our prototype combined a vision camera, temperature and light sensors, a work timer and a display. We experimented with signs of drowsiness, obstacle avoidance and desk-edge detection. We also worked on a charging dock so the companion could stay on the desk with less intervention.
Ideas to handle carefully
Air-quality monitoring and Wi-Fi alerts to a trusted contact were extensions we discussed. They raised questions about privacy, consent and how far a companion should intervene. A-BOT remained an experimental student project about study habits and well-being.
Looking back
What I took from A-BOT
A-BOT gave us a way to bring robotics, interaction design and our own experience as students into the same project. Coordinating the team still meant managing the budget, purchasing and practical decisions alongside our mentors.
It also made us discuss what a companion should be allowed to observe and when it should intervene. Those questions stayed with me beyond the prototype. We received the Projet X 2024 high-school prize on 21 May 2024.
The prize & documents
We won the high-school prize.
Projet X 2024 · 21 May 2024