When Jillian Ogle started creating Remo.TV in the summer of 2019, it was never imagined that the following year most of the world would be going in to lockdown, with so many people working from home and separated from friends and family for what could be just a few weeks, or potentially much longer.

Beyond just a bit of fun to “play” with a robot over the internet, it’s quickly becoming clear that having an internet connected robot friend at home with you can have a lot of benefits:

They can keep you company by allowing other people to “chat” with you, either friends and family, or by making them public and allowing anyone from around the world.

They can help other people around the world see somewhere else other than the house they are “stuck” in during the Coronavirus lockdown.

You can let someone “in” to your home (or office, or wherever you are) without them actually being there. No risk of infection being bought in to your home from a visitor, as they aren’t actually with you physically.

It seems the time of the internet controlled telepresence robot really has arrived in 2020!

Remo.TV has been made like Slack or Discord where you can create a server, and decide who to invite. You can make your robots private, or add them to the public directory.

The platform is free to use and add robots. The controller software for adding a robot can run on a Raspberry Pi, with a Python repo available from https://github.com/remotv/controller, and the whole platform is also open source.

Coronavirus Lockdown Diary— Day 0 :

Hours before lockdown was announced in the San Francisco area, a huge effort was made to shift as much of the essential robot making (and fixing!) equipment to ensure Jill could continue to create new robots for the internet to enjoy.

‘Just the essentials…’

Alongside continuing to develop and improve the site, the plan is to have as many of the robots “live” as Jill can at various times throughout this very critical Coronavirus situation, and you’ll be able to interact with them, and Jill, via https://remo.tv/join/ay4l4ea.

A large number of other RemoCasters around the world are in a similar position so will definitely appreciate you popping by and saying “hi!”.

Beep bop, and stay safe — from the robots and Jill at Remo.TV