So Vincent, Benny and I have been working on a cute little project over the past few weeks. It's a compact telepresence robot, similar to the one that the famous Johnny Lee wrote an instructional for on his procrastineering blog. The key factor of our design is the optical coupling between the mobile device and the robot control hardware: in our implementation, we use Skype for two-way video but embed the control signals in the video stream as well - thereby reducing the amount of development (in terms of hardware and software interfacing). We've submitted an ICEC demo paper along with the following video, which should do a slightly better job at explaining how it works:
We hope to get together an instructional, and a DIY kit soon so people in the community can play around with the idea (if the video isn't enough to get you going :)
A few points on my personal motivation/comments for this project:
1.) Robots are cool; telepresence robots are also cool.
2.) Mobile devices are so powerful these days that you can do so much with them. However, for the DIY hobbyist/hacker, it's not that easy to interface these devices with custom hardware that you build. For example, on an iOS device (iPhone, iTouch, iPad etc), you are quite limited when it comes to interfacing hardware. Even if you do have a developer license, it's still pretty hard to get a physical connection to the serial port working (at the risk of voiding the warranty and blowing up the device, etc). Using platforms such as Android does away with the license hurdle, but the hardware interface is still not easy. This project is essentially a demonstration at a quick and dirty (but working!) solution to this problem. There are many ways that it can be improved (e.g. modulating the visual signal, auto-calibration of the sensors, etc etc), but it should provide a good starting point.
3.) I'm surrounded by a bunch of amazing people with different skills and really appreciate the opportunity to work with them. This project was definitely worth the evenings and weekends we spent at home or in the lab tinkering away. Good job guys!
