
Anybots launches QB proxy robot - tlb
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/051810-anybots-qb-new-telepresence-robot
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dpatru
With very little addition, something like this could be used to allow people
to control machinery remotely. I'm thinking of commercial janitors (vacuum
cleaners could be remotely controlled) and lawn mowers. Both of these
activities are mainly just walking or riding around guiding a noisy piece of
equipment which could be stopped if something went wrong. Also, machines could
be semi-autonomous: controllable by a human when one is available, and able to
do useful work by itself when not being human controlled.

You probably wouldn't want to drive a car or fly a plane with this yet, as a
network glitch could result in disaster, but there are plenty of activities
where a shut-down can be done safely.

~~~
krschultz
[http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/31/robot-lawnmower-kills-
dan...](http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/31/robot-lawnmower-kills-danish-man-
begins-resistance/)

Just saying, lawn mowers are not exactly the safest things in the world. I'm
working in field of robotics (more outdoors than anybots) and I wouldn't
really want to see that yet. Robots are great at detecting obstacles to avoid
with Lidar, they are not great at handling edge case scenarios. With our bot
even in "autonomous" mode somebody is watching, not sure if I want to add a
spinning blade to it.

All of the military bots are remote controlled, not autonomous. I can't think
of any major autonomous vehicle being used for fluid tasks (i.e., not
inventory robots). So what, you are going to have someone sitting there
watching 10 robots mow lawns remotely? How much cheaper can that be than just
hiring people to mow lawns.

I don't think robots are very good at replacing people in low wage jobs. A lot
of uniformed people think that makes a lot of sense because robots replaced
factory workers, but robots did not replace factory workers because they were
cheaper. Robots replaced factory workers because they were better. They were
faster and more accurate. A paint job done by a robot is better than one done
by a human. I worked on a project automating the assembly of a medical device
- it was just too damn small to be done by a person reliably. The system cost
almost a million dollars, you could have paid the girl it displaced for years
and years and years before you pay it off - except that the liability of
making a medical device incorrectly is astronomical.

So I do not target low wage jobs as a prime market for robots, there is no
money in it. Robots are good for replacing jobs that are the dull, dangerous,
dirty, impossible for humans to do, repetitious etc.

~~~
savrajsingh
any guesses as to why they made a 'slope mower' with such a high center of
gravity?

~~~
lawn-boy
That was the first model...the second model has a much lower center of gravity
(too bad the 45 yo. danish man couldn't wait till the region got the second
version) but there should be a sensor if more than 2 wheels are off the ground
for more than 1 second the blades disengage.

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mattmaroon
I so wish I had $15k that I didn't care about. I'd buy this thing and send it
to bars just to say cheesy pickup lines to women.

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motters
As a roboticist here's my 2p worth.

$15K is on the pricey side, but for some industrial inspection tasks I can
imagine this being a cost which can be justified. For just meeting folks in
the office I'm not sure that many businesses are going to go for this. For
casual use the cost is going to need to be lower, and from a hardware point of
view there's no reason why the cost can't go much lower.

My biggest beef with this robot though is its mechanical design. There's no
good reason that I can see why it has to be balancing on two wheels. As a
technology the balancing system is fine, but it doesn't appear to be fail
safe. If the robot suffers a failure, the most common of which will be battery
failure, it should fail in a safe position. With a balancing robot if there is
a failure it's just going to fall over and crash into stuff, generating a
hazard and liability issues. Depending on the environment in which the robot
is deployed, uncontrolled toppling could have very serious consequences (for
example, starting a fire).

~~~
robobenjie
Two wheel balancing does have some advantages: We wanted the robot to be human
height and have a small footprint so that it could navigate nicely through
doors and tight spaces. To keep a tall, small based robot from falling over
you have two choices:

1) You can put a whole bunch of weight in the base. (This is the route that
Willow Garage seems to be going. They have a huge lead acid battery in the
base. The advantage of this is that it is static and 'always on'. The
disadvantage is that your robot has to be really heavy.

2) You can be dynamically stable. With this approach when you are bumped you
use your drive system to actively deal with the disturbance. The advantage of
this is you can deal with much larger disturbances
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkzgglYjNvY>) The disadvantage is that it
only works when there is power.

I totally agree on the battery failure scenario and it is something we have
thought about a lot. We have a separate board that just does the balancing and
it has a separate Ultra-capacitor power supply that can power the drive system
for several minutes; long enough to put our kickstand down and sit. You can
crash the main CPU and pull the batteries out and the robot will sit safely.

I don't know if self balancing is for sure better than statically stable, but
I think it is less clear cut than what you imply.

-Benjie (Engineer at Anybots, obviously)

~~~
dskhatri
Why not have QB deploy the kickstand/third wheel on low-battery conditions?

~~~
robobenjie
we absolutely do that. (We forget to put them on the charger all the time, and
they are always happily sitting in the morning)

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ivankirigin
I was able to play with it the other day. I couldn't believe how light it was.
Trevor ran over my foot, and instead of saying "ow" I said "ohh, pardon me"
like it was a real person there. That's probably because the 2-way audio makes
it seem like the driver really is there. It has the presence of a person
because of the height, but the inherent safety of something like a roomba
because of the weight.

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abstractbill
It's awesome to see a second Anybots product - hopefully there will be a long
line of them!

TLB, can you share anything you learned from the QA? Were there any unexpected
use cases?

~~~
tlb
QA had two big problems. First, it looked too much like a sci-fi robot and
people wanted to interact with it rather than the guy controlling it. Second,
it was heavy (65 lbs) and fragile. After a couple of smashups we found
ourselves just picking up the phone instead of using it.

We redesigned QB to look more abstract, so it doesn't seem like a 3rd party in
the conversation, and it's light (35 lbs) and padded so we just drive it full
tilt all over the office without worrying about the robot or furniture.

We originally thought the main use case would be avoiding trips overseas, but
we find ourselves using it to ask questions of people in the next office.
Email and IM went through the same trend, so I guess that shouldn't be
surprising.

~~~
jasongullickson
The ring around the head evokes the hat-wearing look of a 1940's businessman;
was this the intention of the designer?

~~~
robobenjie
when asked he replies, "hmmmm.... uh. Of Course!"

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jasongullickson
My favorite feature (from the FAQ):

 _Is it bullet-proof? bomb-proof? flame-proof?

No. But robots are replaceable -- people aren't. We think one of the most
valuable services a robot can perform is to get blown up instead of its
operator._

~~~
wmf
I foresee a product placement in _The Hurt Locker II_.

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dpapathanasiou
What if more than one person activates his QB proxy at the same time?

Is robot-to-robot interaction as good as person-to-robot?

~~~
tlb
Good question. When the sound comes out of one robot's speaker and into the
other's microphone, it sounds a bit tinny though intelligible enough. One of
our planned hacks is to shortcut the audio inside the cloud, but it's tricky
to not end up with extra echoes.

~~~
Splines
> it's tricky to not end up with extra echoes.

Is that because when you're routing the audio directly from robot to robot,
that it's technically difficult to cancel the extra transmission that is being
sent from robot speaker to robot microphone?

~~~
tlb
Yes.

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jluxenberg
$15k seems a little steep for what looks like a smaller version of a Segway
that doesn't need to carry a 200lbs human. You'd think there would be more
startups in this space, as there's definitely a market and this is the stuff
of the future.

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tocomment
Did they hire an industrial designer to do the design and shapes? I've always
wondered how you make physical things aesthetically pleasing.

~~~
tlb
The design is by Scott Wiley. If you've been to the Anybots / Y Combinator
offices, the oil paintings on the walls are all his. He's also a mechanical
engineer who has designed space station lasers &c.

Modern 3D cad software & stereolithography are amazing. You can get a student
edition of SolidWorks, upload the 3D files to stereolithography.com, and get
parts back in a week. Cost for smallish parts is tens to hundreds of dollars.

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judegomila
Very cool. No more physical appearances at conferences needed anymore.

~~~
JabavuAdams
Huh. Actually, that could pay back pretty quickly. I always wanted to go to
Siggraph...

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borisk
Robot start price - $15 000, cracking into it across the net - priceless.

~~~
tlb
So choose a good password, or always wear pants.

~~~
borisk
Good password? That doesn't sound very secure. Why not at least use an RSA
token generator. It takes 5 lines of code.

What OS does the robot computer run?

Great product BTW ;)

~~~
tlb
It runs FreeBSD 8. We use SSL between the robot & cloud, but user logins to
the web interface use passwords over https. I'd like to support something
stronger. Can someone point to a website with truly secure logins I can poke
at?

~~~
borisk
Provided security is not the selling feature of your product, I'd say use a
simple and effective 6 digit RSA token generator.
[http://www.mygaming.co.za/news/PC/4428-World-Warcraft-
look-t...](http://www.mygaming.co.za/news/PC/4428-World-Warcraft-look-the-
Battlenet-authenticator.html)
<http://bnetauth.freeportal.us/specification.html>

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divya
this thing is adorable. i smile every time i tab past the IEEE article in my
browser. now you've just gotta get Beyonce to sing about it (a la "video
phone") and you'll be in business.

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plusbryan
Congrats Trevor!

