Helios Telepresence Robot

There are a number of these desktop robots floating around these days that turn your camera-equiped mobile phone into a telepresence rig. Helios is the brainchild of two Princeton students, Tianlong Wang and Xinyi Chen.

Each of the MAKE editors who will be at the Faire has a beat assigned for the upcoming World Maker Faire (Sept 29 & 30). Mine is robotics. I’m looking forward to seeing the Helios and talking to Tianlong and Xinyi about their bot. They’re about to launch a Kickstarter campaign to raise money and to offer Helios pre-orders, for $99. On my robotics beat at Maker Faire Bay Area I saw a similar robot, Claire Delaunay’s Botiful, designed for Android phones. The Helios is for iPhones. Amusingly enough, even I thought I’d dreamed up this idea last Christmas and started making drawings and talking to people about it, then I did a web search and discovered there were already a number of them (and none of them were the Helio or the Botiful).

There will be plenty of other cool robot creations at World Maker Faire. Are you going? We hope to see you there!

Maker Faire Project Profile

Helios

Helios is a mobile base that turns your iPhone into a telepresence robot. To use it, simply open our app, put your iPhone into the seat of the base, and the other end of the video chat can control the robot base to move around you remotely. You won't need to worry about not seeing everything and everyone during a video conference, or to yell "come back" at your kids when they run away from the webcam. Your friends will be able to see your surroundings, and have the experience of actually being next to you. We plan to bring Read more →