I've been researching a lot lately and in 2024 ( and with black friday looming ) there's quite a few ROS platforms coming down in price to jumpstart you a ton. Here's just what I found. Most of these would do well with a frilly dress covering the components a bit like robomaid projects but 99% of what you need for facial detection, mapping and cheap naviagation is here. https://www.hiwonder.com/products/mentorpi-m1?variant=41285495685207 This is probably the best base for the money right now. Comes with lidar, TOF depth camera, a full ros2 control system that works with RTABMAP and a lot more so you don't have to think about the easy stuff. After that, it's just running a local model for friendly interaction. Upper body: Red rabbit robotics is probably the best bet right now. Unfortunately, it's using ROS1 https://www.redrabbitrobotics.cc/ as for basic arms probably so-100 leRobot https://github.com/huggingface/lerobot/blob/main/examples/10_use_so100.md get teleoperation working and then feed it a recursive LLM to learn tasks and you're on the level of stuff like optimus on a smaller scale, that's all they're doing. operation of things like a kiryoo launch if you want to get spicy could be directed to the LLM to activate the addons. Use small cell phone mDP panels on ali express for eyes and face if you want, or a tablet which also doubles for wirelss control. Good luck in 2025 y'all.