(Credit: Rubin Huang) Who hasn’t, at some point, wished they could exist in two places at once? Today, you certainly can do that, but in practice, it’s far less sexy than cloning yourself or traveling back and forth through time to simultaneously exist in overlapping timelines. Instead, duplicating yourself entails beaming your face through a tablet device that’s mounted atop a moving pole. Indeed, telepresence robots on the market today are essentially Skype on wheels; they’re expensive; they’re hardly immersive; they're a little awkward.
So, self-described technologist Rubin Huang saw an opportunity to hack a better way to duplicate himself. His inspiration? Seeing his cat ride a Roomba—as they are wont to do. "What will be an affordable platform for me to build the robot upon?" Huang wrote. "I suddenly saw my cat is riding my roommate's Roomba! That's it!" Huang cobbled together an assortment of off-the-shelf hardware, such as ...
