  This article presents Teledrive, a telepresence robotic system with embodied
AI features that empowers an operator to navigate the telerobot in any unknown
remote place with minimal human intervention. We conceive Teledrive in the
context of democratizing remote care-giving for elderly citizens as well as for
isolated patients, affected by contagious diseases. In particular, this paper
focuses on the problem of navigating to a rough target area (like bedroom or
kitchen) rather than pre-specified point destinations. This ushers in a unique
AreaGoal based navigation feature, which has not been explored in depth in the
contemporary solutions. Further, we describe an edge computing-based software
system built on a WebRTC-based communication framework to realize the
aforementioned scheme through an easy-to-use speech-based human-robot
interaction. Moreover, to enhance the ease of operation for the remote
caregiver, we incorporate a person following feature, whereby a robot follows a
person on the move in its premises as directed by the operator. Moreover, the
system presented is loosely coupled with specific robot hardware, unlike the
existing solutions. We have evaluated the efficacy of the proposed system
through baseline experiments, user study, and real-life deployment.
