Have you been stabbed by a robot?

So I’m that type of friend who you can always call if you have hot tea or if you’re planning some shenanigans, and my friend Andy knows this very well. One night Andy had the idea of having The Internet driving a rover around his factory, something like Twitch Plays Pokémon*, and he called me and explained the situation and in two weeks I was already in Detroit working on this.

It was quite a simple development, a phone mounted on the rover sends livestream videos to YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch, and a server running chat scrapers monitor what the viewers are commenting looks for orders and post the results to an MQTT broker, that the rover is monitoring, as movement or sound commands. you can have the system running from scratch in an hour or two, but finetuning it takes a bit longer.

During our first night we had over 2000 viewers controlling it simultaneously, it went to 3000 the next night, so we knew we had something big in our hands. The community that formed in the chat was quite interesting, I don’t consume livestream content, so I don’t really know how they usually are, but I was absolutely fascinated by it. It was like watching ants getting together to form a bridge, the commands were executed in arrival order, and there was latency because of the video stream of course, but while they couldn’t go on a straight line for more than a second, and deciding where to go on the factory was always an issue, you could tell that the collective mind did have some very strong objectives. Knocking down objects, trying to pop car tires, and more important, stabbing people in the ankles. No matter how difficult the terrain was, no matter how many drivers were on the task, they would always find the way to get to Andy or me. It was brilliant!

With the lessons learned in the factory we decided to take John the Rover to Open Sauce** and see how the concept works on a crowded event. If you’ve never heard of it, Open Sauce is the ultimate tech expo for makers and tech influencers so not only the exhibitors are very technical, but the attendees are also quite knowledgeable, and that meant having to deal with new challenges as mischievous tech enthusiast roam every hallway.

Making John hacker proof, or at least hacker resistant consumed most of my time on the days previous to the event. I hired two servers to separate the scraper from the MQTT broker, and to separate both from my own devices. The scraper ran on Azure, hidden from the rest of the world and the only communication was to my computer and to the MQTT broker that ran on a Linode that I left alone and never connected to my computer. My idea was that anyone who could intercept the messages between the rover and the broker would first have to take control of the Linode to then learn about the Azure, take control of that server and then have anything that could point to my computer. Everything was encrypted, everything used crazy long passwords, and everything was deleted the day after the expo ended. Was I being a bit paranoid? Probably, did I learn a lot about cyber security for this project? Yes!