Humans: meet “The Rat,” my home-built robot journalist experiment.
Only a little larger than a coffee cup, The Rat can go where people can’t and capture images from a perspective people can’t.
The Rat is remote controlled, equipped with an iPhone (also remote controlled) and has room to add other capabilities like heat sensors, a telescoping rod to raise and lower the camera (right now it tilts, but doesn’t rise), sound capture, etc.
Building it required:
- A basic Rover robot kit, powered by a Raspberry PI
- An iPhone
- Camera software that allows one iPhone’s camera to be controlled by another iPhone
- A remote control
- A custom “sketch” program written to tell the remote control buttons what to do
Help me out – what stories would you cover using The Rat?
