Linux-based telepresence robot navigates autonomously

iRobot announced its Ava 500 telepresence robot last June, and says it is now shipping it in North America and Europe. We’ve seen some evidence that the 21-inch Cisco Telepresence EX60 tablet, which forms the videoconferencing “head” of the robot, runs Linux, and in 2011, Forbes said the original Ava reference design ran on a Linux-based robotics platform called Aware. Indeed, iRobot has now confirmed to us that the Ava 500 runs on embedded Linux. In fact, with its companion Cisco EX60 device, it has two Linux brains.