

Anybots Telepresence Robots Go into Mass Production - jlhamilton
http://singularityhub.com/2010/01/25/anybots-telepresence-robots-go-into-mass-production/

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jacquesm
Hehe, couple this with the amazon mechanical turk and you can have _real_ I
(instead of AI) controlling telepresence robots to do work.

Rent-a-brain for remote control of your robot to do the chores, such as
laundry, vacuum cleaning and feeding the animals.

I can see a tele-operated McDonalds capped robot smiling and saying 'hi may I
help you' with a bit of an accent in your near future.

Outsourcing is about to enter a whole new phase.

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pg
You're not far off, actually. One of the original raisons d'etre of Anybots
was to do labor market arbitrage, by letting workers in one country perform
operations in another. But that's not the intention of the QB. It doesn't have
any hands.

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ericd
Wow, that's a really exciting idea. How does one deal with the latency,
though? I would see that as being the biggest technical issue standing in the
way of a really seamless experience. For the labor arbitrage application
especially, if there was a sort of VR setup, I imagine that the lag would get
sickening pretty quickly.

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tlb
VR goggles are OK with 150 mS round-trip delay, as long as the user's head
movement is compensated for locally. There are lots of wrong ways to do it,
such as moving the robot's head to match the operator's, but it's not too hard
to do it the right way.

It turns out the human nervous system has 100 - 200 mS delay. Peripheral
nerves conduct at only 10 - 50 m/S, so your brain is already adapted to some
delay. More delay makes juggling & stuff harder, but most office work is only
slowed down slightly.

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pg
I was at the bots today and there were 5 QBs in various stages of
construction. I knew it would look impressive when there were n of them, but I
was still surprised.

(The article has it slightly wrong. The QA was the previous model.)

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philwelch
Congratulations tlb!

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TrevorJ
Any word on price? My gut tells me that something that relies on off-the shelf
tech will be easier to adopt since we could keep the price points lower.

