A Novel Communication Architecture and Control System for TeleBot:A Multi-Modal Telepresence Robot for Disabled Officers

There is an incredible need to help disabled veterans and police officers to remotely perform patrolling and law enforcement duties. Currently a disabled officer is medically retired following a severe duty related injury, depriving the individual of a career and the talent of an experienced officer in his/her prime. This results in billions of dollars of wasted talents and resources. This paper presents a detailed development and analysis of a telepresence robot designated as TeleBot# to assess how it can be used to help disabled officers return to active duty. The principal contribution of this paper comprises of robust communication architecture for efficient human interaction with the robot that almost resembles a law enforcement officer and capable of receiving commands that are issued by a disabled officer from a remote location. Two high definition cameras in the head assembly of TeleBot wirelessly transmit live video stream of the TeleBots visual field to the remote operator wearing a virtual reality based stereoscopic display. Additionally, a voice recognition system enables the TeleBot to greet people and accept voice based commands from the operator. The user-friendly software embedded on the system provides seamless communication between the officer at a remote location and the public through TeleBot. The striking factor of this design is affordability in terms of cost.