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Telepresence Robot Rundown
DeviceGuru writes "A handful of innovative high-tech startups have recently emerged to create a new market: remote telepresence robots. With one of these robotic Avatars, you can wander around in the remote environment, chatting with coworkers and managers, attending meetings, and solving problems encountered through those interactions. InformationWeek's Telepresence Robot Smackdown compares five such bots — the MantaroBot TeleMe, VGo Communications VGo, Anybots QB, Suitable Technologies Beam, and Revolve Robotics Kubi — and includes short videos demonstrating each. As the article concludes, 'bear in mind that what we're witnessing here is the emergence of a new industry; and if Moore's Law applies here as it does to so many IT spheres, it won't be long before these gadgets are inexpensive, commonplace, and far more flexible and intelligent."
I have worked with a remote telepresence robot for over 5 years now: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/sep/13/guardianweeklytechnologysection.news It's quite an interesting social experience. There are many technical challenges to consider (batteries still being what they are). Admittedly, our implementation is more "hobbyist" than anything else, but it's a very functional POC.
When I saw the headline I thought someone had hit a robot with a truck.
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video conferencing (even lame webcam types) works great. It won't replace a face to face meeting, but it's a heck of a lot better than everyone on a conference call. And if you are coordinating with people who are a day's travel away, burning 2 days of travel for a 1 hour meeting means that even if the video conference is 1/10th as efficient as a live meeting, you're still ahead of the game. (I'm sorry, I don't count the ability to kind of sort of work on a plane, even in business class, as being a substitute for being in your office with your resources close at hand)
And if you have a high end telepresence setup like the one from Cisco with the fancy sound and video system, it's pretty amazingly close to being there in person. The big thing you miss is the ability to have side conversations, but text messaging/im/fast email sort of replaces that (while, unfortunately, leaving a discoverable documentation trail, something that a whispered aside does not).
One of the most valuable aspects of video conferencing is that it fixes the problem with straight teleconferences where you have a big group in one place and singletons in others. In the latter, there's no good way for the singleton to get the attention of the big group. But with videoconferencing, your smiling or grimacing face is down in the corner of their screen, and when you wave, they remember you are there.
Just think, once everyone is using these we can shrink an office building down to the size of an armoire. Everyone's bot can scurry around the small building being in each other's presence. It will save oodles of money. Of course, once we've done that, we'll realize that the office building is a logical concept that doesn't need a physical presence, and we'll create a virtual office, with virtual presence bots, where everyone roams the virtual halls. And we'll call it WOW or Minecraft, or something like that. World of MeetingCraft?
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
I've seen several programs about children with severe allergies that cannot attend school with other kids. The telepresence robots allow them to virtually attend school, and participate in normal classes alongside their class mates. They can go to recess with their classmates, go to the cafeteria, and in general interact with the classroom, the teacher, and the other students in a way that they find to be pretty natural. Sure a webcam and screen would work, but being able to drive remotely and interact as kids do has proved to be very successful. The other kids interact with his avatar robot just as if he were really there. It's quite encouraging to for a child who otherwise would be extremely isolated.
Maybe these are edge cases, but they do prove how this sort of technology can work.