Our Double Robotics Telepresence Robot arrived today

Very useful video to see the tech in action.

One thing I wasn't prepared for was how slow and pointless it was to be navigating around the office workspace. Seems like such a waste of time to be rolling around the office in a regular workday, at a speed that seems so much slower than pedestrian traffic. My immediate thought was that it would make worlds of sense to have the bot run ROS and generate sensor maps of the office, so it could automatically traverse, and avoid objects, so I wouldn't have to pay attention to the mundane work of having to drive it around. At that point though, it makes me question having a driving around bot at all. Video conferencing drops you immediately into the location without the traversal anyhow...

Also, it def seemed to make some of the coworkers feel awkward and spied on, especially the impromptu discussion the driver lurked.

Interesting to see this all in practice!

Glad you're getting value out of it but to me it seems slightly creepy and not very useful. I clicked on the link to the product and their video is even creepier.

I'm really excited to see this kind of robotics become real. I wish we could have one of these to explore the office my company just acquired.

I've thought of adapting my Arduino self-driving car to be wirelessly-controlled, maybe by a RasPi. Use a WIFI USB stick and/or a cell-hotspot for connectivity. Then put a microphone stand on it & tape a webcam shield to the stand & SSH to connect to it. (The RasPi would make the project work better, as most of these pieces already exist/could be modified to work with it more easily than several Arduinos IMO)

Will, I'm curious about the latency of this setup. Could you get someone in the office to control the Double while having the Double pointing at the computer screen? Maybe with a clap at some point so we can see the source of the sound and get an idea of delay? Thanks!

I am thinking that they should be loud when they move, simulated loud like an electric car, just to reduce the sneaky.

Also should have a very very pleasent ping sound for getting peoples attention and what not.

I don't know if it's just me, but a vertical-line (similar to rear-view cameras in cars) that guides the operator of the robot could be really useful.