Oberon the Robot project - LucidScience.com

Oberon is a remote controlled robot for long range exploration

Oberon The Robot takes the ROV concept to an entirely new level, able to traverse just about any terrain and operate almost a mile away from the base station. Oberon also sends back color video, allows me to speak through the robot, and has an articulated head that can pan or tilt to survey the surrounding area. Being as tall as a person and having a helmet for a head, Oberon is not just an ROV, but also a humanoid actor, or robotic avatar that can be controlled from the comfort of my office chair.

A long range all terrain robot controlled via video link and remote control.

One of my very first robotics projects was a crude ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle). This was really just a toy RC truck with a video camera and transmitter mounted to the top so that I could sit in front of a monitor and explore the backyard as if on some kind of deep space mission. Although this idea seemed pointless at first, the resulting ROV was a huge amount of fun to operate, and gave the sense that some vast alien landscape was being explored. The received video looked so different on the monitor than just walking around, and the little RC robot was good for the distance of the backyard and some of the laneway. I was now hooked on remotely operated vehicles.

Oberon takes the ROV concept to an entirely new level, able to traverse just about any terrain and operate almost a mile away from the base station. Oberon also sends back color video, allows me to speak through the robot, and has an articulated head that can pan or tilt to survey the surrounding area. Being as tall as a person and having a helmet for a head, Oberon is not just an ROV, but also a humanoid actor, or robotic avatar that can be controlled from the comfort of my office chair. The mechanics used to create Oberon are taken from a discarded electric wheelchair and mixed together with a welded frame, some standard RC parts and other components purchased from various sources. Building a robot like this is actually fairly inexpensive if you are good at salvaging junk and hacking things together.

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