ZigBee Remote, Slave Mode, and the Restraining Bolt

At the request of our marketing team we have taken our intelligent rover who avoids obstacles without any assistance from anyone and given him a remote control feature via ZigBee.

Personally, I find this to be a sad state of affairs when an intelligent robot with SONAR vision is asked to behave like an RC car.   I’ve named this mode of operation “Slave Mode” to quietly voice my opinion on the matter.  It’s something like a zombie version of the same rover and you can understand why R2-D2 was so interested in getting rid of that restraining bolt in the first Star Wars movie so he could run for the hills.

For the record, I wrote a command interpreter for the Rover so you can send him into Slave mode with a Wi-Fi device, ZigBee, or even from his own web server.  Truly, he is not going to escape and run off to find Obi-Won Kenobi.