Super Regis Roving Robotic WebCam

SuperREGIS Roving Robotic WebCam

Overview

Welcome to the SuperREGIS roving robotic webcam. In brief, through this web page you can drive a semi-autonomous robot around my office and receive images of your progress about every second or so. The current program running on the robot will not allow you to steer into an obstacle, so there's no need to worry about crashing into things. Note that the robot is completely untethered -- communications from the custom written-web server to the software running on the robot is by radio modem, giving you more or less complete freedom of movement around my office. Note that REGIS is generally only up weekdays from 7am-5pm US Central Standard Time (GMT-6), and must recharge at night. I will also try to have him up on weekends, but the hours will be somewhat later, as I like to sleep in. Finally, the system may be down for code upgrades or other experimentation from time-to time. Public access may be disabled completely on occasion.

In addition to driving the robot around, you may use the chat/status window (beneath the video window) to chat with other users online. From here you can also use the robot's text-to-speech feature to cause the robot to vocalize ASCII text sent from the chat window. See Chat Window Commands below for more info.

NOTE: Access to the robot is shared among all current users, i.e., no single user has exclusive access to the robot. Commands are processed on a first come, first serve basis. Play together nicely.

Quick Start

The robot control software that runs on your browser is written in Javascript -- you should need no special plugins to run the robot, but you will require a moderately recent browser with Javascript support enabled (this should be the default for most browsers). Cookies are used to save your nickname on the system, but are not mandatory.

To rotate the robot, use the slider to rotate lefto or right 0-90 degrees. Move foward by hitting the "Forward" button. The robot will move forward for about 10 seconds, or until it encounters an obstacle. Hit the "Stop" button to stop the robot. Be aware that depending on the quality of your connection, there might quite a bit of lag between the issuance of a command and the accompanying video, which only refreshes every second or so. This can make steering a bit tricky at first, but with practice you'll get the hang of it.

Robot Control Page - Click here.

The Video Window

On the right side of the control page is the Video Window. Images from REGIS are displayed here, and update approximately once a second. Note that the video times out after 30 seconds of inactivity (no commands issued ). In this case, the screen will usually be blue, with a time stamp along the bottom. Issue a movement command (Rotate, Forward, or Stop) and the video will come on. You may enable video without moving the robot by issuing the Stop command.

On occasion, the video window may be black. This is usually because A) The lights are out in my office, or B) The batteries on board the robot have run down. The latter possibility is the more likely.

Moving the Robot

Beneath the video window are the movement controls:

Slider - Rotate left or right 0-90 degrees. As you move the slider, the exact degree of rotation will be updated. Release the slider to start the turn. Note that the turn does not begin until you release the slider.
Forward - Move forward for 10 seconds or until an obstacle is encountered. Be aware that some obstacles may not be visible to the camera. If you try to move forward and the robot does not respond, rotate some and try again -- there is most likely an off-camera obstacle blocking your movement.
Stop - Stop the robot. Can also be used to re-enable the video after it has timed out.
Cruise (currently disabled) - Move forward. The robot will change course to avoid obstacles and continue, instead of simply halting. This is the preferred method of navigation. Useful for getting thru doors or tight places, but not very useful if you're trying to get up close to something to examine it (use Forward instead). Good to use if there is a lot of latency on the video, or if you simply have a slow connection. .

Nickname

On left side of the contol page, just above the status/chat window your current nickname is displayed in an editable field. If you wish to change your nickname, just click on the field, type a new nickname in and press the Enter key. If you have cookies enabled, your nickname will be saved and used automatically on the next session.

Chatting

On the left side of the control page is the chat window. Both user chat and status messages are displayed in this window. To chat, enter text into the white text field just beneath the chat window and press <Enter> there are also a number of commands which you can issue to the robot from the chat window:

/S - Causes REGIS to speak aloud the following ASCII text. For example /S Hello there, mikey will activate REGIS's text-to-speech module, causing ot to say, "Hello there, mikey". May not be available when the auxilliary tranceiver is in use.

Who's on

Beneath the chat window, the Who's On link can be used to drop down a list of users currently connected to the robot. This list includes the nickname of each user, and any IPs we've heard from associated with that user. A (whois) link next to each IP is used to look up whois and location info on any IP displayed via the most excellent dnsstuff.com website.

Links