What you need

scout is two machines and a handful of accounts. Everything below is what the code in this repo actually expects (.env.example, docker-compose.slim.yml, Makefile).

The body — FrodoBots Earth Rover Mini+

Earth Rover Mini+ — photo from the FrodoBots shop; the CAD, schematic and firmware SDK live in frodobots-org/earth-rover-mini. See Hardware & 3D files.

A four-wheel skid-steer rover with a front + rear camera, mic, speaker, headlamp, GPS, IMU + magnetometer, per-wheel RPM and a 4G/Wi-Fi link to FrodoBots' cloud. You never talk to the rover directly: the Earth Rovers SDK (our fork) runs a headless Chromium that joins the rover's Agora WebRTC channel and exposes it as plain HTTP — /control, /data, /v2/front, /v2/rear, /speak, /rover-mic, /rover-speaker.

Accounts you need

• A FrodoBots account with the rover registered — gives you SDK_API_TOKEN and the rover's BOT_SLUG.
• A model provider: AWS Bedrock by default (STRANDS_MODEL_ID, boto3 credential chain or AWS_BEARER_TOKEN_BEDROCK); OpenAI for the Realtime voice (OPENAI_API_KEY); optionally Google for Gemini Live.
• A Telegram bot from @BotFather if you want to drive from your pocket.
• A Cloudflare account if you want a public hostname (free tunnel, real TLS).

The brain — a box that runs docker

The reference deployment is an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor ("Thor") on the same Wi-Fi as the rover, but the slim stack (scout:slim, python:3.12-slim, CPU only) is deliberately portable:

	slim scout:slim (recommended)	GPU scout:latest
base image	python:3.12-slim	vllm/vllm-omni:cosmos3
needs	docker + compose, ~16 GB disk, arm64 or amd64	NVIDIA GPU, ~50 GB
Cosmos world-model tools	❌ gracefully absent	✅ on-GPU
dataset recording (LeRobot)	✅ (INSTALL_LEROBOT=0 to drop)	✅
everything else (agent, cockpit, personas, YOLO, voice)	✅	✅

Chromium, CPU torch, lerobot, node 22 + the vendored tiny-tech MCP server are all baked into the image — the host needs nothing but docker (and python3 for the optional host-side persona supervisor).

The controller — optional

A PS4 controller (or anything pygame sees) turns on teleop recording: controller_start streams sticks → /control at ROVER_CONTROLLER_HZ and records the drive as a dataset episode. Not required; the cockpit's glass joystick does the same from a phone.

The phone / laptop

Anything with a modern browser. The cockpit is a PWA — on iOS Share → Add to Home Screen gives a full-screen app with Face ID passkeys. WebAuthn needs HTTPS and a hostname (never a raw IP) — see Auth.

Next: install on the brain →