Telepresence Robot Product

Overview

A telepresence robot is a video call that can move. A remote operator logs in from a browser or app, sees the room through the robot's cameras, talks through its Speakers, and drives it around an office, hospital, lab, or factory floor. The machine has three sections: the Drive Base holding wheels, battery, and most of the mass; the Telescoping Mast; and the Display Head showing the operator's face at eye height.

Height matters more than it first appears. Conversation feels wrong when one party looks down at a screen on a cart, so the mast raises the head between about 1.2 m (seated eye level) and 1.65 m (standing) during a call. The Lift Actuator turns a Ball Screw inside the Mast Outer Tube, sliding the Mast Inner Tube on polymer Guide Bushings; two Limit Switches bound the travel and a Cable Chain manages the head wiring through the stroke.

How it works

The operator's commands arrive over Wi-Fi to the Compute Unit, where a Compute SoC Module runs the WebRTC video stack and a separate Microcontroller turns drive commands into wheel velocities. Each Drive Wheel Module pairs a Servo Motor with a single Helical Gear Pair reduction and an Encoder; differential speed steers the robot, and the encoder odometry smooths the operator's joystick or keyboard input into non-jerky motion. Two passive Swivel Casters complete the footprint.

Because the operator may have 100+ ms of network latency and a narrow camera view, the base protects itself. Six Sonar Sensors form a near-field ring that also catches glass partitions, four Cliff Sensors watch for stair edges and loading-dock drops, and the Safety Bumper skirt cuts drive power on contact. The Navigation Camera — a fisheye looking down past the mast — gives the operator a view of the base footprint and the floor immediately ahead, which is where most collisions happen.

The call itself runs through the Audio/Video Suite. The Call Camera uses a 110° Lens Assembly so the operator sees a whole meeting table without panning. The Microphone Array carries six MEMS Microphone MEMS elements; beamforming steers pickup toward whoever is speaking while acoustic echo cancellation subtracts the robot's own speaker output, allowing full-duplex conversation. The Tilt Actuator nods the whole head ±25° through a self-locking worm Helical Gear Pair, so the head holds its angle without power.

Stability constrains the whole design. A 1.6 m mast on a small base tips easily, so the Base Chassis carries steel ballast and the Battery Tray puts the 40-cell Li-ion Cell, 18650 pack at floor level. Maximum speed is limited to 0.9 m/s, and acceleration ramps in the motor firmware keep dynamic tipping moments small even when the operator slams the controls.

Docking and power

At the end of a session the operator (or a scheduled job) sends the robot home. The Dock Station emits two coded infrared lanes from its IR Beacons; the IR Docking Receiver reads them to center the final approach, and the robot rolls its spring-loaded Charge Contacts onto the dock plate. The dock's internal Power Supply then charges the 288 Wh pack in about three hours, supervised by the BMS Board with a Thermal Fuse as the last line of protection. Standby draw is low enough that a docked robot is always ready, which is the operational point: nobody on site should ever have to plug it in.

Etiquette hardware

Several parts exist purely because the robot shares space with people. The Status LED Ring around the Head Housing shows bystanders whether a call is live, muted, or the robot is driving autonomously to its dock — answering the "is someone watching me?" question at a glance. The screen brightness and speaker volume are capped in firmware for open-plan offices, and the Touch Digitizer on the LCD Panel lets a local person answer or end a call without an app.

Applications

The original market was remote work and executive "walk the halls" presence; the durable ones turned out to be healthcare (specialist consults at remote clinics, infectious-disease wards), manufacturing (vendor support engineers inspecting a line without flying), education for homebound students, and museum or facility tours. Compared with a fixed videoconference room, the robot's one irreplaceable feature is that the remote person chooses where to look and where to go.