RobAIR, a telepresence robot
Ever wanted to be at two places at the same time? Now you can.
Our robot.
RobAIR is a joint project between several schools and laboratories in Grenoble, aimed at designing a telepresence robot. The idea is for example to visit a museum without actually going there, but to send RobAIR instead. Its camera and microphones will be your eyes and ears, while his speakers and screen will assure your vocal and visual presence. A tablet can be used to see what RobAIR sees, and to give him piloting instructions. The whole project is totally open source, and based on free technologies such as Ubuntu and ROS (the Robot Operating System) tries to use cheap and widely available components, such as Arduino cards or Kinect sensors.
I worked with three other students on software components for the piloting part of RobAIR. Our tasks included documentation work about algorithms for crowd avoidance and writing ROS nodes to implement those algorithms. Unfortunately the robot was not ready for testing when we reached the ROS implementation part, so instead we did some soldering and breadboard design, and wrote Arduino code for RobAIR’s obstacle-avoidance sensors.
More information about our work can be found on our team’s wiki page, and some of the code is available in this GitHub repository.
In the end I also designed a presentation flyer (in French) showing off the next iteration of the RobAIR series, made by another team of students (with purple flower pots instead of wood for the body. Did I mention affordable?)
