

Rise of the telepresence robots - dman
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/07/30/anybots.robots.office/index.html#fbid=iYqFM0nL-d2

======
RiderOfGiraffes
Anybots have had considerable press here on HN. It's an interesting advance,
and there has been a great deal of discussion already.

In case you're interested in seeing what people said in the past, and the
predictions made then, here are some of the HN items about them:

<http://searchyc.com/submissions/anybot?sort=by_date>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=538848> <\- 2 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552929> <\- 10 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=575394> <\- 2 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=629143> <\- 2 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=745831> <\- 14 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1076157> <\- 10 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1357787>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1357896> <\- 40 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1388509>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1499582> <\- 45 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1506155> <\- 3 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1554166>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1554420>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1557937>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1561736>

~~~
dman
Thanks for the links!

------
pg
The QB recently passed the telepresence equivalent of the Turing Test. Anybots
and YC are in the same building, so these things are always driving around. I
was recently talking to Trevor, who was using one, and asked if he wanted to
come over to our house that night for dinner. I assumed he was in the back of
the building. He said he couldn't make it because he was actually in Hawaii.

~~~
mwerty
QB should have made it.

~~~
paraschopra
If only the robot could generate energy from food. (Or, if PG served electrons
for dinner!)

------
jasonkester
_People could use them to go on remote vacations, he said, touring the streets
of a faraway country or interacting with the locals without ever leaving their
bedrooms._

Average TeleHoliday Duration: 4 Minutes.

Seriously, how long would you have to drive your 35 pound 15,000 dollar bill
around the streets of Rome before somebody made off with it? The guy on the
street corner who unlocks phones could surely unlock one of these, and presto,
free robot.

I don't think a sane person who values his property would ever drive one of
these things out into public unsupervised.

~~~
andrewvc
Well, the easy answer would be to arm the robot.

------
jacquesm
Telepresence is one of those things that hasn't even scratched the surface of
what's possible. Cab drivers in foreign countries, remote surgery, robot road
assistance...

It's one of those fields where SF meets reality in the most concrete way, and
I don't think it will be long before each and everyone of us will have been
interacting with one of these or will have been in the drivers seat in one
form or another.

The biggest stumbling blocks to wide acceptance will be legal ones.

~~~
dman
I think social factors will be big stumbling blocks too. Already there is
dissent in some ranks on tech immigration. Imagine this spreading to fields
like medicine, dentistry etc which have been safe career choices with few
disruptions. Cant see specialised fields taking kindly to telepresence.

~~~
jacquesm
It will be outsourcing squared, all those 'safe' jobs suddenly having to deal
with their jobs being outsourced to the lowest _global_ bidder. Talk about
disruptive.

edit: Let's hope the dentists that serve the people building this tech are not
reading HN, the negotiations could be fairly painful.

~~~
Agent101
I'm a bit leery of teleoperated machinery, rather than physical people. Not
saying it can't be done, but adds in a few more things that can go wrong. And
while outsourcing coding can incur extra delays if something went wrong with
the link/power supply, I don't want a robot with a drill in my mouth.

So what would I need to go to a teleoperated dentist.

-Reliable direct satellite link?

-Own power supply in the clinic in case of black outs.

-Similarly reliable supplies in the operators place, or sufficient numbers of people that could take over the operation if the something went wrong with them.

Also any surgeons/dentists in the house? How important is reaction time. Would
latency be an issue?

~~~
philwelch
Yeah, I'd be fine with a teleoperated robot surgeon, if the human surgeon was
in the next room with scrubs and gloves, ready to rush in at a moment's
notice. Because, while the robot may be more precise and steady-handed than a
meatbag, the meatbag I suspect would have better error recovery.

~~~
Ardit20
He doesn't have a bag, its only meat.

------
antirez
I love technology and progress but this is just sad IMHO: "People could use
them to go on remote vacations, he said, touring the streets of a faraway
country or interacting with the locals without ever leaving their bedrooms."

~~~
halostatue
I concur, but one of the things that this could be useful for is touring
places that are too "dangerous" (to the places) for a full-weight human to
tour. But a tele tour of Italy would not have been as good as the tour of
Italy I took earlier this month.

------
motters
I think this sort of telerobotics is going to be a growth area in the next
5-10 years. All of the necessary technologies have been coming into place
within the last decade, and there are some compelling reasons for using such
devices - avoiding unnecessary and expensive business trips, and helping to
reduce energy consumption and pollution. I can think of past occasions in my
own career where having one of these robots at a customer site would have
saved a lot of time and money, and resulted in a much more rapid diagnosis of
issues.

~~~
tlb
We're very interested in deploying them as field support robots. Especially
for physical equipment. We'd be happy to have you in our beta test program.
info@anybots.com if you're interested.

------
nkassis
I was really skeptical on reading this article. I mean, what's the point if
everyone going to be working remotely one day then why have space and robots?
But the comments here are changing my view. What if I could have a generic
robot in the house that my doctor could log into? It still seams far fetch but
for 5K why not? Even the gov ( I live in canada) could provide these to people
in need. A robotic nurse is going to be really useful one day. With less
commute home care could scale better.

Of course if the robot could also be used by a plumber(auto sanitizing feature
;p) car mechanic... I don't have to go out of my house. Which is a scary idea
;p

Aside from security and privacy issues (pull the plug?) I think that's not
such a bad idea.

~~~
mkramlich
Assuming that not everybody can be telecommuting from a remote location, then
one role for this sort of a robot would be in letting remote managerial types
check up on the workers who ARE working "on site" (not telecommuting). Of
course, just having mounted cameras at the workplace could do this, but if you
have a very large or complex facility layout, or simply don't want to have a
large number of cameras, then a roving robot may be nice. I suspect the unit
price will have to come down by an order of magnitude or more before they
become competitive enough with the stationary camera alternative.

------
elasticdog
Here's a photoset of us using a QB at work a few months ago:
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/elasticdog/sets/721576238573723...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/elasticdog/sets/72157623857372302/)

I'd say the user interface needs some work, but the hardware is great and it
was really fun to see people's reactions around the office! (the mustache was
my idea)

------
dgallagher
I can see the headlines now...

"Cheating Husbands and Wives (CHAW) lobbies for ban of Anybots. Claim sanctity
of their marriages at stake."

------
lutorm
It looks reasonably useful for the remote person, who can see and hear what's
going on in the room. (As long as it has stereo microphones so you can get
some 3d sound perception, that's always been my beef with videocons.)

However, there's much less information going _to_ the people who are _with_
the robot: there's no body language, no facial expressions. How do you even
know who the robot is?

Personally, I would not feel comfortable having a discussion with such a robot
because of this. It's like an extreme version of talking to people who wear
sunglasses inside. At least with video chat you can see people's faces.

------
pedoh
As a remote employee, this looks amazing. I can't count the number of times
I've been involved in company meetings where the presenter has forgotten to
pass around his presentation or start a web conference. I can't even count the
number of times I've had to ask people to repeat themselves due to bad
connectivity and lack of visual clues. Having my own QB to keep in the office
would be great. I don't think I can get my boss to drop $15k on one, though.

------
jimbokun
The positive response to this seems down right bizarre to me.

"People could use them to go on remote vacations, he said, touring the streets
of a faraway country or interacting with the locals without ever leaving their
bedrooms."

This seems to be a serious suggestion. Um, so the vision of the future from
Wall*E is something to aspire to? No reason to ever leave your bedroom again,
for anything? Not even vacation? That's the value proposition?

Except, all the people there are in their bedrooms controlling their robots,
so your robot is just interacting with the other robots there. Except, the
people living there are probably controlling a robot near where you live,
anyway, so your robot is probably just hanging out with other robot tourists.

For remote work arrangements, the thing that is lacking is the massive amount
of information conveyed through body language. 100% of the body language of
the person controlling the robot is still not conveyed. So what problem is
this actually solving?

I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the idea that what we really need is
one less reason to get up off our asses and move our bodies.

~~~
mseebach
I think the vacation example is a typical example of journalist dumbing-down.
Travel is about actually being there, not a very good candidate for
telepresense. If it was, HD travelshows would be a substitute for vacation.

Think outside the box, of cases where the presense of the flesh of the
practitioner is undesirable, either for safety, space, logistics, or costs.
Someone mentioned taxi-drivers, which is a very good example.

~~~
aufreak3
_If it was, HD travelshows would be a substitute for vacation._

They don't _substitute_ for vacation. They might very well satisfy that urge
to travel ... just like people watching Discovery or Nat Geo in the comfort of
their homes. You can do this _everyday_ as opposed only a few times a year ..
which you can still do.

~~~
mseebach
My experience is that watching TV from exotic destinations tickles my urge to
travel, by no means satisfying it.

~~~
aufreak3
You're right. It does satisfy some of the "knowledge gaining" aspects of
travel though.

------
serichsen
Some ideas:

\- The icon on the forehead of the robot should indicate who is currently
controlling it. \- This could even be a little screen for a webcam in front of
the controller. \- An office full of these robots could be an innocuous
setting for a "secret" Turing test.

------
sharvey
this + augmented reality + webcam = a lot better.

If is weird, though, that a robot would be used in a context that could
perfectly suited for virtual interaction. Kinda like a cartoon car with arm to
control the steering wheel instead of controlling it directly,

------
roschdal
Great news, I have been hoping that someone would focus on robots for
telepresence for a while now. I really see a demand for this, in particular
because I live in a remote location (Norway), and hope that telepresence
robots will make the job market truely international. This is a positive
effect of globalization, in my opinion.

However, I always imagined that the telepresence would include a holographic
projection of the person being telepresenced, rather than an ugly robot. This
might also solve the problem of people not naturally prefering to communicate
through a robot.

~~~
dman
Who says the robot has to be ugly? ;)

~~~
jimbokun
If it's not, you need to find some way to the other side of the Uncanny
Valley.

------
projectileboy
Fun article; I always love reading about the latest goodies from Anybots. On a
different note, this was a pretty awesome PR hit - CNN seems like a good
score. Who is the PR firm for Anybots, or do they do their own?

------
dman
After thinking about this heres a few thoughts a) Providing reputation metrics
and discoverability for remote services is going tobe big. b) There will be
opportunities to manage and run remote services. aka some dental robot CVS
like location on every third block. This looks like a naturally monopolistic
business. c) Telepresence might provide a counter balance to location based
network effects. Currently things are completely stacked in favor of moving to
big cities, in the future living in a low cost area might be the source of
some competitive advantage.

------
recampbell
I was thinking "wouldn't it be cheaper to just install some cameras and an
intercom?" But I guess that becomes surveillance instead of remote presence.
Hence the raison d'etre of anybots.

~~~
cracell
Or for talking to employees remotely, Skype + webcam is a much cheaper and
less creepy/invasive way to talk remotely.

------
lukestevens
I'd love to see the tech in Microsoft's Kinect combined with this concept -
it's already in the mass market, just need something to translate the
movements (transmit video/audio) to a 'robot' on the other end.

These robots really need an LCD screen to show the face of the remote user
though. I think we naturally attribute traits to the robot itself, not who's
controlling it, and that's the weird part. Have the user's face appear and
it's just "Oh, it's Bob. Hi Bob!"; (conceptual) problem solved.

~~~
city41
I think the 8 hour battery life was an important feature for them to hit, so
that is probably why the robot itself is pretty spartan.

------
ams6110
So the boss can sit on his ass at home and send a robot to see what I'm up to?
I can't see that being very inspiring to the rank and file..

~~~
city41
It would really depend on the culture of the company. I live in Denver and my
boss is in Texas. I think for our team makeup, a robot like this could
actually be effective.

------
Caligula
I am curious about something. Telepresence is a big Cisco brand. Is there any
risk of trademark infringement? It is in a related domain, communication over
video that is a component of anybots.

I am somewhat ignorant about trademark, but thought I would mention it.

Really cool robot. It looked great on video.

~~~
ars
Can you trademark a word from the dictionary? I don't think you can.

~~~
SwellJoe
You can, and probably 99% of trademarked brands _are_ dictionary words, but
not when the word means generically what your product does and you try to use
just that word as your mark. You can't trademark "Computer", but you can
trademark "Apple Computer" or "Dell Computer", etc.

Telepresence is a recently made-up word, so it's plausible that one could
register it as a mark...but defending the mark would be difficult.

------
leot
... any guesses on how long it will be until this can be successfully (UX-
wise) paired with head-mounted displays? My bet is that we'll get this no
sooner than 2012, but no later than 2014.

------
johnrob
Where is the bandwidth going between the robot and the end user? Does anybots
host proxy servers in between?

