This telepresence upgrade lets an employee take part in the office from more than four thousand kilometers away. It’s an upgrade of their previous setup which used a laptop on a rotating platform to add a bit of control to the video conferencing experience. But all that original version could do was swivel, this one lets you drive your virtual self around for fifteen hours between battery charges.

The real work is in the base of the robot, as the audio and video are handled by a tablet independently from the locomotion. The team spent about four hundred bucks to throw the thing together. It starts with a hunk of plywood. Two 3A motors were mated with lawnmower wheels for the front of the bot. Dragging under the back of the base are a couple of casters that make it possible to turn without skidding. A motor shield and a WiFi shield for the Arduino make it possible to control the thing over the Internet. They even added some functionality on the client side to use a PlayStation 3 controller. Check out the completed machine in the clip after the break.

A friend of mine (Dimos) from another site (www.GRobot.gr) started building a tracked robot that would be operated remotely.

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It is a noisy, yet a novel idea. Extremely useful to talk to your near and dear ones while moving around the house doing chores. The arduino controlled two 5V relays with 12 V 40A car relays prove as the base hardware. The control system however, consists of a simple html page with ajax calls to php scripts that sends serial commands to Arduino using this.

The complete know-how along with code can be found here.

[Via: Hackaday]