Teledrive: An Embodied AI based Telepresence System

TL;DR

Teledrive is a telepresence robot system with embodied AI that enables easy navigation and person following for remote caregiving, using edge computing and speech interaction, tested through experiments and deployment.

Contribution

This work introduces an AreaGoal navigation feature and a flexible, hardware-agnostic telepresence system with speech and person-following capabilities.

Findings

Effective navigation to rough target areas demonstrated

User study shows ease of operation and usability

Successful real-life deployment in caregiving scenarios

Abstract

This article presents Teledrive, a telepresence robotic system with embodied AI features that empowers an operator to navigate the telerobot in any unknown remote place with minimal human intervention. We conceive Teledrive in the context of democratizing remote care-giving for elderly citizens as well as for isolated patients, affected by contagious diseases. In particular, this paper focuses on the problem of navigating to a rough target area (like bedroom or kitchen) rather than pre-specified point destinations. This ushers in a unique AreaGoal based navigation feature, which has not been explored in depth in the contemporary solutions. Further, we describe an edge computing-based software system built on a WebRTC-based communication framework to realize the aforementioned scheme through an easy-to-use speech-based human-robot interaction. Moreover, to enhance the ease of operation for the remote caregiver, we incorporate a person following feature, whereby a robot follows a person on the move in its premises as directed by the operator. Moreover, the system presented is loosely coupled with specific robot hardware, unlike the existing solutions. We have evaluated the efficacy of the proposed system through baseline experiments, user study, and real-life deployment.