DIY telepresence robot

Since I may need to work far away from home (from 200+miles, e.g., Minneapolis, MN, to 2000 miles, e.g., Los Angeles, CA) in the near future, I am considering to build a telepresence robot to keep in touch with my wife and kids at our Iowa home.

I first got the idea of telepresence robot from an issue of IEEE Spectrum a few months ago. Here is the link, A DIY Telepresence Robot, and a website mentioned in this IEEE article, Sparky Jr., dedicated to DIY, open-source mobile telepresence. Today, I found another post about this idea,titled "Google Engineer Builds an Affordable DIY Telepresence Robot To Keep In Touch With Remote Fiancee", and the Google engineer's Jonny Lee's website that explains his approach is Procrastingeering. The total cost of Lee's telepresence robot is about $500. If you don't make you hand dirty, iRobots is going to release an app platform, AVA, so you can forget the DIY work on the hardware and focus on coding on this new tech gadget now.

I think the cost can be further reduced if I replace the $250 netbook with a Chinese Shan-Zhai netbook or APad (Pad running Android). Nowadays, there are lots of APad under 1000 RMB (~150 US dollar) with touch screen. For example, 7寸Android 安卓系统的MID APAD 平板电脑 1000元以下, 1000以下平板电脑排行. I believe my kids will love the touch screen, and in turn love their daddy! In addition, it is very cool to connect a Kinect on the remote site, so I can control the robot at remote home using my hands and pose.

This idea is great, at least for me. I am planning to do it right after submitting ICCV paper.

The following are a list of useful websites for DIY robot I discovered after I first post this blog:
http://www.robotshop.com/store
http://www.parallax.com/
http://www.servocity.com/
http://www.surveyor.com/SRV_info.html