Using IoT and Computer Vision to Build a Stand-in Robot for Remote Workers
A group of IoT and computer vision specialists went on a mission to solve one of the biggest challenges of remote work. Their journey led them to build an autonomous smart robot to allow remote-workers to enjoy in-office antics when at home or traveling.
Employees of many companies are used to joining meetings no matter where they are, using tools such as Slack, Google Hangouts, and Zoom. A sweet consequence of this is often a generous work from home policy, allowing them to work from home whenever they want.
Trouble is, working remotely leads to missing out on all the fun that takes place outside of meetings when they’re not connected. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a robot representing us at the office, showing us what goes on while we’re not there?
A group of IoT, computer vision and full-stack specialists at Tryolabs got really enthusiastic about the idea and went on a mission to create a smart robot that could be remotely controlled from home and show us what takes place at the office.
They had three rules to follow:
The remainder of this post was written by TryoLabs regarding their hackathon.
It all started with the design of the mini-robot’s mechanical structure, which is present at the office while the remote worker isn’t.
To have a robot that can easily move around the office, it must be mobile, stable, small enough to pass through doors, and big enough to not be overseen and trampled on by the team working at the office. We went through several iterations of its structural design before settling on this one:
We chose aluminum as the main material for the components since it’s light, robust, and cheap.
Once we defined the design and selected the materials, we cut the aluminum parts and put them together with small screws. Since we had to work with the tools available at the office and from the store around the corner, this was a rather improvised and humorous process. We used heavy books to shape the aluminum and sunglasses as safety glasses while drilling into the components, just to give you an idea.
The main hardware components we settled on were:
While some of us continued working on the hardware and assembling the pieces, the rest of the team started building the software that would control all the components mentioned above.
The aim of the smart robot’s software was to enable real-time communication between the remote workers and the teams at the office. In other words, the robot needed to be able to transmit video and audio from the office to the people working remotely and vice versa.
While evaluating various approaches to solving this problem, we came across WebRTC, which promised to be the tool we were looking for:
Specifically, we used the WebRTC extension included in UV4L. This tool allowed us to create bi-directional communication with extremely low latency between the robot and the remote worker’s computer.
