Here’s a quick snapshot of the telepresence robot my friend T and I have been working on for quite some time. I wrote the software stack and T, the hardware. 

As of now, there are three ways to control it remotely - one is via Chat (I am using XMPP for those curious eyes out there); it can also be controlled via browser and the most fun way - via iPhone accelerometer. It’s been a truly telepresence robot because my friend lives 700 miles away with it. With the help of iChat, git and Dropbox - it’s been an interesting physical IDE :-)

I am still writing lots of new patches to the software side - it’s been a challenge working over immediate response seeing that pushing video alone eats up quite a bit of bandwidth. Of course, a more immediate challenge is keeping the MacBook Pro server (this controls the bot) and my friend from not crashing into each other. This was a huge challenge to overcome using the accelerometer on the iPhone. Then, there’s the problem of the small buffer in Arduino and the blocking I/O - which warrants a separate post itself. Overall, there’s definitely some useful code base that I am planning Open Sourcing. Keep an eye on my gitHub.  

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