[Turtlebot-users] Introducing TED

[Makopack at yahoo.com]

So, a couple of us here at work have been wanting to do some experimentation with Telepresence, and to use it to help us communicate with the main office in New Jersey (I'm in a small 7 person office in Atlanta, and we certainly suffer from the "out of sight, out of mind" issues with the people in the main office...)

We already had a create, a kinect, and a spare laptop (Dell d620) sitting around, so we just had to buy the 9" USB monitor, webcam, speaker, the parts for the kinect power hack and gyro, and all the plexiglass and other hardware...


To that end, I used the TurtleBot plans and code as the starting point to build TED - Telepresence Experimentation Demonstrator...

Pictures can be found here:

http://s185.photobucket.com/albums/x200/crazybiker_ga/?action=view&current=c90ae6c1.jpg

http://s185.photobucket.com/albums/x200/crazybiker_ga/?action=view&current=496d7540.jpg

http://s185.photobucket.com/albums/x200/crazybiker_ga/?action=view&current=f53ffc3e.jpg

http://s185.photobucket.com/albums/x200/crazybiker_ga/?action=view&current=7da54e04.jpg

http://s185.photobucket.com/albums/x200/crazybiker_ga/?action=view&current=133c439a.jpg

We still have software work to do... We would like to have the control interface be completely web based so no software has to be installed on the controller side, so be prepared for a slew of questions as I'm pretty new to ROS...

Enjoy! And thanks WillowGarage for providing the plans as Open Source...

--Mike