Yantrax is an AI-powered robot that guides museum visitors, maps archaeological sites, and digitizes historical manuscripts — speaking multiple Indian languages, completely offline, entirely on its own.
Meet YantraxBuilt for the World Robot Olympiad
The Robot
India holds thousands of years of history — and far too few hands to guide, map and preserve it all. Yantrax is our answer.
Inside a museum, Yantrax drives itself between exhibits, greets visitors it detects along the way, and explains each artifact through speech and an interactive touchscreen — in the visitor’s own Indian language. At archaeological sites, the same robot switches roles: it maps the terrain, records what it sees, and turns fragile handwritten manuscripts into searchable digital text with its onboard OCR.
No internet. No operator. One intelligent platform, preserving culture while it guides the people who came to experience it.
See the tech
System Architecture
Every ability runs on one Jetson Orin Nano 8GB under ROS 2 Humble — no cloud service anywhere in the loop.
Perceive
Understand
Act
Every year, manuscripts fade, inscriptions weather away, and stories go untold because there aren’t enough guides, archivists and surveyors to go around. Our mission is to put intelligent robotics to work where human hands are scarce — guiding visitors, mapping sites and digitizing documents before time takes them.
We imagine museums where every visitor is welcomed in their own language, and archaeological sites that are mapped and archived as carefully as they were built. Yantrax is our first step toward that vision: technology that doesn’t replace the human connection to heritage, but multiplies it.
What Yantrax Does
Offline Intelligence
Everything Yantrax knows runs on a single NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano. Autonomous navigation steers it through crowded halls; computer vision spots visitors and artifacts; speech recognition understands questions in multiple Indian languages and answers in kind. Because none of it needs the cloud, Yantrax works just as well in a basement archive as in a modern gallery.
The same platform carries an OCR pipeline that photographs historical manuscripts and converts them into digital, searchable text — and a mapping stack that surveys archaeological sites as it moves. Touch, voice, vision and motion, fused into one machine that any museum can simply switch on.
Get in touchMeasured, Not Estimated
Say This
Yantrax never speaks first — person detection only decides when it is allowed to listen. Wake it with its name or a double clap, then just talk.
“Yantrax”wakes it — so does a double clap
“Follow me”locks onto you, routes around obstacles
“Map this area”builds and saves the SLAM map
“Read this document”scans it, then reads it aloud
“Status report”spoken health check of every subsystem
“Stop”latching e-stop — it stays stopped until released
Anything elseanswered by the offline LLM, in your language
Hardware
Every ROS 2 package builds with zero warnings. The preflight script verifies every subsystem, in order.
Milestones
Phase 01 // The Spark
It started with a school museum visit and a simple observation: one guide, eighty visitors, four languages in the room. We formed Team Yantrax around a question — what if the museum itself could speak to everyone?
Phase 02 // The Build
Months of building followed: an autonomous drive base, a touchscreen interface, multilingual speech, person detection, site mapping and a manuscript OCR pipeline — all squeezed onto one Jetson Orin Nano and proven working completely offline.
Phase 03 // The Stage
Now Yantrax carries our work to the World Robot Olympiad Future Innovators, Senior Category — representing our belief that the best way to protect India’s past is to build boldly for its future.
The Robot, Every Angle
Traditional Indian folk art on the outside, a full autonomy stack on the inside — because a robot that lives among heritage should look like it belongs there.
Team Yantrax
Team Yantrax is three students who believe heritage and high technology belong in the same sentence. Between us we cover the robot end to end — the autonomy that moves it, the AI that lets it see and speak, and the design that makes a machine feel welcome in a museum.
We compete in the World Robot Olympiad Future Innovators, Senior Category, under one motto: “Preserving Heritage Through Intelligent Robotics.”
Team Member
“A robot in a museum shouldn’t feel like an exhibit. It should feel like the friendliest guide you’ve ever had.”
Team Member
“Offline is the hard mode of AI — and exactly why it works in every museum, not just the connected ones.”
Team Member
“Every manuscript we digitize is a story that can never be lost again. That’s worth every late night.”
Get in touch
Maybe you run a museum or heritage site that could use an untiring, multilingual guide. Maybe you’re a mentor, judge or fellow builder curious about how Yantrax works under the hood. Or maybe you simply love the idea of robots keeping culture alive. Whatever brings you here, write to us — we’d love to talk.