I have been working on the last few months on couple of robots for home and the office. I finally had time to cook up a page for the project. The address is techconsultants.us/officebot (techconsultants.us/officebot just in case the url is filtered out).
Quick summary of the features:
• Fully controlled through computer with client and server components.
• Full audio and video conference capabilities.
• Remote charging and maintenance.
• All wheel drive.
• Remotely controlled rocket launcher system.
• Text-to-Speech and voice recognition.
• Remote sounds and music.
• Variable speeds.
Thanx I don’t have many other ideas to add to this guy. Although a robotic arms might be good. However, it’s going to be hard for people to use it with just using computer keyboard or the mouse. My goal is to distribute the controller program in the office so people can drive. Too complicate of a movement might get people confused. I’m open to fun ideas though since it’s bot is design as a fun office toy beside a mobile conference machine.
The other thing that I might be able to do is incorporating a GPS into this so that I can map out the cubicles locations and design the robot to autonomously drive to a location in the office. It should be relatively straight forward since I have the Dell there. It’s probably harder to allocate time to play around with it since my work and house project taking a majority portion of my time.
What is the nature of the building that the office is in? GPS signals often cannot be received/used effectively indoors due to their weak nature, and the fact that they are susceptible to multipath and interference in metal-framed structures, or those with a good amount of metal in/near them.
Have you tried mapping the office “manually” with a handheld GPSr (at various times of the day, and therefore different configurations of the GPS constellation), to verify that it works reliably without too much error? If you can manually navigate in the office with a GPSr, and still fall within your acceptable margin of error, then you can probably work out a way to implement it successfully on the bot. If, on the other hand, you have an unacceptable amount of drift, signal loss, or ‘wandering’, you may want to look into an alternate form of navigation, as there is only so much you can do to improve a GPS signal indoors.
Good suggestion. Thanks. Our building is a high rise so yes, it will definitely have plenty of metal frames. I haven’t try any gps devices on the floor. The gps thing is just one of suggestions that people at work have. I am not sure it will ever be materialized since I’m quite busy with other projects .
