After visiting the oil spill in June 2010, the young engineer decided to leave MIT in Boston to develop an opensource oil spill cleaning robot, Protei.
In its current incarnation, the Avatar doesn't do much apart from offering telepresence -- authenticated by the company's servers -- but the robot has been designed to be opensource.
Creatively calling the plug-in boards "capes" in reference to the cape worn by a beloved cartoon beagle super hero, the active opensource BeagleBoard.org community designed the plug-in boards to foster an even wider range of innovations such as robot motor drivers and sensors that measure location and pressure.