A walking, talking robot from Interstellar — with a brain, a sense of humor, and a gait it learned by itself.
Drag the robot to orbit · click a part to inspect it
One Python process on a Raspberry Pi 5. Every layer degrades gracefully — from a full cloud AI stack down to 100% offline and free.
Offline wake word, a spoken "Yes?", follow-up questions without repeating the name, replies streamed sentence-by-sentence while the LLM is still thinking.
Drop a decorated Python function in a folder, it becomes an LLM tool: move, look, remember, timers, music, Home Assistant, image generation.
Humor, honesty and sarcasm from 0 to 100 — adjustable by asking. Character cards switch TARS into CASE or KIPP.
No arms, by design. An IMU fall watchdog relaxes the servos when TARS tips over, and a gyro stability tax makes smoother gaits win during training.
Semantic long-term memory plus a structured knowledge graph, injected into conversation only when relevant.
Streaming chat, browser voice from any phone on the LAN (HTTPS built in), movement pad, live learning curve — and a movie-style onboard readout at /display.
OpenAI + ElevenLabs for the best experience, or Ollama + Piper + Vosk for a TARS that never phones home.
tars --doctor self-tests 12 subsystems with fix hints, --benchmark times the voice pipeline, and everything runs in simulation on a laptop.
Raspberry Pi 5, a PCA9685, three to six servos, ~1.5 kg of PETG and a weekend of printing. Bilingual docs (EN/IT) cover everything — including which Bambu Lab printer to buy and how to get the brushed-metal movie finish. Chassis STLs by the TARS-AI Community.
Every part with quantities, printer comparison, filament, metal-finish techniques.
BudgetLine-by-line prices, three scenarios, monthly running costs.
AssemblePrint settings, wiring (mind the 6.2 V!), assembly order, calibration.
RunArchitecture, every skill, AI-stack options, HTTP API, troubleshooting.
No simulation hand-waving — the reward is real centimeters covered. An evolution strategy mutates the gait timing; the tape measure, the camera or the IMU judges the result. A MuJoCo pre-filter (the same gait code, driving physics instead of servos) screens thousands of candidates overnight, and a Spearman honesty check tells you exactly how much to trust it on your floor.
TarsGPT is based on Charlie Diaz's original TARS replica — the idea that started it all — rebuilt as an original codebase and extended with everything on this page: the AI runtime, the skills system, gait learning with verifiable rewards, the balance-first redesign and the bilingual documentation. The 3D-printable chassis is by the TARS-AI Community (CC BY-NC 4.0). TARS is a character from Christopher Nolan's Interstellar; this is a non-commercial fan project, unaffiliated with the film.