{"slug":"dum-e","name":"DUM-E","hackathon":"hack-the-north-2025","tagline":"Voice-commanded robotic arm that sees its workspace and acts on natural-language instructions.","placement":{"status":"finalist","awards":["Hack the North 2025: Finalists"],"track":null},"team":{"size":4,"members":["Jason Liu","Eric Tao Xie","Daniel Ganjali","Chinmay Jindal"]},"problem":"Hobby and lab robot arms run pre-programmed routines; they cannot understand a spoken request or reason about a cluttered table.","solution":"A 5-DOF servo arm driven by a vision + language pipeline: a webcam view is warped to a bird's-eye frame with homography, segmented, and sent with coordinates to a fast multimodal LLM that chooses actions; a Raspberry Pi relays them to an Arduino running inverse kinematics, with position feedback closing the loop.","demo_moment":"Say a command out loud and the arm sorts parts on a messy table, holds a tool, or waves back.","build_style":"hardware-software","tech":{"stack":["python","opencv","flask","raspberry-pi","arduino","servos","groq","llama-4-maverick","whisper-large-v3"],"ai_patterns":["computer-vision","llm-api","voice-ai"]},"domains":["robotics-hardware","productivity"],"analysis":{"why_it_stood_out":[{"claim":"Named and framed after Iron Man's robot helper, so the pitch needs no explanation.","basis":"curator-inference"},{"claim":"Chose homography + inverse kinematics + fast LLM inference over research-stage vision-language-action models, trading novelty for a demo that reliably works.","basis":"team-stated","source":0},{"claim":"Visible engineering on the table: six servos, ~9A of current, full-rotation wiring and a closed feedback loop.","basis":"team-stated","source":0},{"claim":"Organizer featured it on the next year's homepage as a showcase project.","basis":"organizer-stated","source":1}],"mechanisms":["cultural-reference-hook","physical-artifact","demo-first-wow","visible-engineering-depth","one-sentence-clarity"],"judging_lens":["wow-factor","technical-depth"],"lessons":["Pick the boring, reliable technique that makes the live demo work; save the research-grade approach for 'what's next'."],"confidence":"medium"},"links":{"devpost":"https://devpost.com/software/dum-e-kgx6at","repo":null,"demo":null,"video":null},"sources":[{"url":"https://devpost.com/software/dum-e-kgx6at","kind":"devpost-project","retrieved_at":"2026-09-14"},{"url":"https://hackthenorth.com/","kind":"official-event-page","retrieved_at":"2026-09-14"}]}