Robodance Remote Viewing is a hack to remotely control a WowWee Roboquad robot from the Internet using voice enabled speech recognition commands, Skype’s free video calling service and Robodance 4 Beta (which is yet to be released), thus converting your robot at home into a remote spy and making it act on commands that you send. As per the author, the hack works only on Windows XP mainly due to driver compatibility issues with audio and video conversion from wireless camera and microphone on other operating systems.

Here’s a brief overview of how the system works over the air:

+ Your home computer, running Robodance v4, detects an incoming phone call
+ Robodance tells Skype to pick up the call and listens to your voice while it does a brief volume analysis.
+ It then tells Skype to start sending video and audio to your remote computer. The audio and video is streamed from the wireless camera and microphone attached to the Roboquad Robot’s head.
+ Robodance switches on the voice control system. Now when you speak, it uses speech recognition to convert what you say to robot commands.
+ The robot commands are sent to the UIRT which is an infrared transmitter and receiver. The UIRT converts commands to the same infrared signals the Roboquad’s remote control would send to the robot.
+ Finally, Roboquad executes those commands, while simultaneously beaming video and audio back to your Home computer.

You are now remotely controlling a spy robot from the Internet, using voice enabled, speech recognition technology. And if Skype adds video calls to its mobile client, you would be able to give voice commands and remote control your robot from a mobile phone.