Selena Groh, Serena Thoma, and Trung Truong
COMP50AIR: Autonomous Intelligent Robotics
Tufts University
This project created a telepresence system to be used in Halligan Hall at Tufts University. The system used an iPad displaying a Skype call to allow a remote user to communicate with others near the robot, along with the TurtleBot2 as a mobile base so that the remote user could exercise autonomy and drive their "presence" to any desired location within the building. A web-page user interface was created that allowed the remote user to control the robot with either manual commands, such as forward, backward, turn left, and turn right, or through autonomous map navigation, in which the user specifies a goal location on the map display, and the robot will then move to that location. The navigational capabilities of the robot were implemented using RobotWebTools libraries. Overall the system successfully implemented an efficient and usable telepresence system, but even so, there are many features that could added that would increase the range of uses for the system and simplify the user's experience even further.