A hackerhas put together a viable home - brewage telepresence robotusing easy available components that ’s unspoiled enough ( if not middling enough ) to rival much more expensive peer likeAnybot ’s QB . More than anything this paint a picture telepresence practical working is an imminent phenomenon .
The enterprising fellow in question is Johnny Chung Lee . Temporarily split from his partner after a work - driven relocation , he require to make a dewy-eyed elbow room to maintain a front in their previous home . Telepresence droids would be the ideal creature , but Lee decided to go the DIY road . ´
He hacked together an iRobot Create and a netbook , each costing about $ 250 , and even re - engineered the iRobot automate charging stand to juice up the netbook ’s battery as well as the golem ’s driving base . With freely available video - conferencing software like Skype running on the netbook , a two - direction audio - optical removed - mastery telepresence robot is the result .
Check it out in the video .
It works ! While it lacks the elegance of a manufacturing plant - crafted chassis and the apt self - balance motor driveway that Anybots has hand the QB ( which lets this robot undertake trickier story terrain than Lee ’s iRobot motors can manage ) , Lee ’s origination has some definite plusses — it relies on freely available tech , requires no long - term licensing fee , leverage existing engineering that most of us are intimate with and have in the domicile , and it costs one thirtieth of QB ’s $ 15,000 price tag ( a value that ’s driven by Anybot ’s early arrival in this new market ) . In fact , Chung ’s machine may even exhaust QB to a real “ telepresence ” experience , thanks to the larger cover on the netbook — this gives the user a more human - sized head on the automaton than can be seen on Anybot ’s diminutive display ( typical for these droids — thecompeting Vgo telepresence droidalso sports a small screen ) , and may ease adoption of a telepresent - person in societal berth .
But more than anything this hack tells us one braggy thing : Telepresencereally is aboutto become a mainstream phenomenon . If the cost of droids can drop to hundreds of dollars from thousands , and if the fiscal and ecological burden of trillion of commuters driving to study becomes a real job , telepresence is a lucid alternative .
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