Voyager

The Voyager, a re­mote telep­res­ence ro­bot; was cre­ated as a way for users to in­ter­act with peo­ple in re­mote spaces. Made of LEGO and what was, for the time, a very light­weight lap­top, Voyager trun­dled about for a very short life, be­fore be­ing sal­vaged for parts.

The ro­bot is made up of the fol­low­ing bits:

• LEGO VisionCommand Camera
• LEGO Mindstorms RCX and four mo­tors
• Toshiba Portege 3110CT note­book
• Lucent WaveLAN card

The ro­bot’s com­puter runs a Java ap­pli­ca­tion which lis­tens for, and acts upon Elvin com­mand no­ti­fi­ca­tions. Two-way video and au­dio is pro­vided by Microsoft’s NetMeeting. The per­son con­trol­ling the ro­bot can use a sim­ple GUI to send com­mands.

The re­mote Voyager pi­lot sees some­thing like this:

The yel­low bar gives an in­di­ca­tion of the di­rec­tion of the wheels. When a cog ap­pears from ei­ther side, the con­troller knows they are at the far left/​right of the steer­ing. Any fur­ther steer­ing re­sults in the steer­ing gears vi­o­lently com­ing apart. The black bar is to help you po­si­tion di­rectly ahead.