WireOn: Supporting Remote Collaboration for Embedded System Development

The rise of the Maker movement has led to a growing number of developers who prototype and program embedded systems. When programming, these developers often rely on support from various resources-including other developers. However, other developers may not always be available to provide support in person, and existing technologies for online help, such as voice chat or Q&A forms, face the fundamental limitation of inspecting and manipulating developers' circuit boards. As a result, remote helpers can only provide suggestions or guidance, rather than contributing via physical changes made to the devices. And only end-user developers have the ability to carry out the planned tasks. In this paper, we demonstrate WireOn, a programming support research prototype that allows remote helpers to directly perform tasks on end-user developers' circuit board by teleoperating a robot arm. The helpers can control the robot arm via a web user interface to perform simple tasks such as pick-and-place the electronic components, visually inspect the physical artifacts in real time, and also review the code that the end-user sent over to them. The new system has the potential to enable more efficient remote collaboration on embedded system development. (https://youtu.be/uggyxHAlLDQ)