An open platform telepresence robot with natural human interface

This paper explains our low-cost approach to building an open platform telepresence robot, which uses an iRobot Create, ROS (Robot Operating System) and mobile devices. Besides using existing ROS packages we developed an Android application based on rosjava_core and android_core to control and view a live video stream from the remote robot. The robot could be used to have a video conference with people at a remote location. It is also equipped with capabilities such as autonomous navigation, hand-gesture recognition, and speech recognition through cloud computing services provided by Google. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the developed telepresence robot.