Fwd: [HBRobotics] Telepresence robots for social interaction

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Dheera Venkatraman

Hi everyone,
Among the many uses for robots during this pandemic, I think one of
the hugely overlooked use cases is in keeping up mental health of the
community by facilitating human-to-human social interaction. I'm
building a small fleet of mini budget telepresence robots and they're
working pretty well in connecting friends!

They use a Pixel 1 phone for compute (which can be had for <$65
second-hand on eBay) and everything runs from within a HTML5 webpage.
2-way audio/video stream is over WebRTC. Tele-operation is done over
socket.io and the phone communicates to motors via bluetooth to an
ESP32 and a DRV8833.

Plans (docs not fully complete):
https://github.com/dheera/robot-tethys

Videos:
https://youtu.be/UXlsJE6Yq_s
https://youtu.be/V_Wk1ctOpvI

____________________
Dheera Venkatraman
http://dheera.net

--