I apologize that the videos start with the phrase “hey Jerry”; I was never expecting to release these videos to the public. This is a project I worked on for my brother and his kids.

The purpose of the project was to create a robot that could be driven over the internet. The approach is pretty simple:

1. Use arduino hardware to control a platform with motors and wheels.
2. Talk to the arduino with an android phone over bluetooth using a bluetooth arduino shield.
3. Talk to the android phone on the robot over the internet with a socket connection from a 2nd android phone.

My brother was in charge of getting the robot platform and I created the software to run it all. Here are a couple videos showing my progress. I use LEDs to show outputs changing, but the final project will actually be turning on motors to drive the robot.

The first video shows a simple android app that I built to talk to an arduino board over bluetooth. I demonstrate the pairing procedure, and then show that I can turn LEDs on and off from the phone. I’m serializing data over the bluetooth connection and the arduino program (that I also wrote) parses it and change the voltage on the output wires.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHrhAjsnuP4

This next video demonstrates the same thing working, however, the device that is sending the signals to change the LEDs is a 2nd android phone. There is a socket connection between the two phones which allows me to send data between them. This means that the arduino board and 1st phone can be anywhere in the world, and I can still send commands to it from a 2nd android phone over the internet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9ccoTCuT4A

With these pieces working we were able to wire the arduino up to the robot platform and drive it around! My brother lives in Massachusetts and I live in New Jersey, and I drove around his house using my android phone!

Our goal was to bring video over from the android phone into the app I built as well, but I never had time to finish that piece. My brother used a video app that broadcasts the video from the phone through a web server, and this allowed me to connect to a live video feed through my computer’s web browser while I drove the robot from my phone.