How To Attend Next Week's Robotics Show Robotically

DeviceGuru writes "Suitable Technologies is offering $50 rentals of its Beam mobile telepresence robot, allowing 50 robotics enthusiasts to remotely attend the RoboBusiness conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Oct. 23-25. The Ubuntu- and ROS-based Beam will be available to the first 50 applicants, letting them explore the show at up to 1.5 meters/sec and interact with others via video conferencing. The bots will be allowed everywhere on the show floor as well as in conference rooms, and the show will be open late to accommodate remote users from distant time zones. The Beam is a good choice for remotely exploring conferences, saving users the cost and time of traveling to an event, says Suitable Tech; for example, RoboBusiness registration costs $1,595, not including hotel and travel. A list of the conference's keynotes, which include one by Christ Urmson, director of Google's Self-Driving Cars project, is available here."

Comments

Windows or Mac Only?!?

[bjwest]

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with these companies? They use Free/Open source software and/or hardware to build things, then don't offer the controlling or interactive software to those of us using the same damn OS on our desktops that's used in the thingyMaBob. Get the fuck out of Visual Basic, C# or what ever toy development environment you're using for cross platform, and use a real cross platform library. Qt will do all three platforms, and AFAIK, all it takes is a recompile to get it one of the others. And I'm sure there are other true cross platform libraries out there as well.
What cross platform development library are they using that is so frigging awesome, you have to leave out the Linux's? Fuck, if nothing else, use Java.