Telepresence Robot Using Microsoft Kinect Sensor and Video Glasses

Abstract

Developing telepresence robots is one of the most important trends in the robotics research area, where the user acts as he/she is located in a remote location. In 2010, telepresence robots became a noticeable trend after the robot “QB” that introduced by Silicon Valley start-up Anybots (Robotics trends for 2012. IEEE Robot. Autom. Mag. 19(1):119–123, 2012). Although, the availability of “QB” as a commercial telepresence robot, its cost made it unavailable for most users. In this work, a low-cost telepresence robot is presented using iRobot-Create, Microsoft Kinect sensor, and video glasses. The proposed system makes the user feels like he/she is located in a different location and acting as in the normal life (walking, stop, rotating his/her head). The user takes feedback via a streaming video from the remote location to a pair of video glasses worn by him. The remote unit consists of three components: a single iRobot-Create, a laptop, and two web-cams. In the user side, the user’s movements are recognized using Microsoft Kinect sensor. We use the RGB camera in Microsoft Kinect sensor for streaming the video of the user to the remote side. So, People in the remote side see the user, as he/she is located with them. The results of the proposed system show that the user is integrated in another environment using low-cost hardware components.