Rise of the telepresence robots

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

by dman • 16 years ago

134 60 16 years ago

edition.cnn.com

pg• 16 years ago

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.

sown• 16 years ago

I don't think it'll be so bad getting used to this phenomena.

We've been through this before with cellphones. For example, people used to assume that if they could get you on the phone that you were in the same town because they would dial a local number. "Can you come over?" "No, I can't; I'm in Texas."

mwerty• 16 years ago

QB should have made it.

paraschopra• 16 years ago

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

jacquesm2• 16 years ago

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.

dman4• 16 years ago

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.

jacquesm2• 16 years ago

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.

marcusbooster• 16 years ago

They have some powerful lobbyists which you can be certain will push for more licenses to keep their jobs in the country. But that's largely just serving their own interests. It's this kind of tech that really could provide cheaper health care for all.

msg• 16 years ago

I agree. Until you can reliably sue a doctor in Sudan or Hong Kong for messing up your liposuction, it won't take off. Also (US), your insurance company will have to buy off on procedures from doctors they can't appropriately vet, which will probably put a premium on developed countries with higher licensing standards. And so on.

mseebach3• 16 years ago

Think bigger than that. Insurance companies have the most to win here, so they'll pioneer certification.

But you don't even need offshore personel: imagine the "doctor-ATM". Now you can see a doctor 24-7 from a booth on the nearest gas station. The doc just happens to be in the big medical center two hours away.

recampbell• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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

ams6110• 16 years ago

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..

city412• 16 years ago

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.

RiderOfGiraffes• 16 years ago

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

dman4• 16 years ago

Thanks for the links!

roschdal• 16 years ago

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.

dman4• 16 years ago

Who says the robot has to be ugly? ;)

jimbokun2• 16 years ago

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

motters• 16 years ago

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.

tlb2• 16 years ago

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.

dman4• 16 years ago

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.

elasticdog• 16 years ago

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

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)

pedoh• 16 years ago

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.

nkassis• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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.

projectileboy• 16 years ago

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?

Caligula• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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

imp• 16 years ago

Apple? Yahoo?

SwellJoe• 16 years ago

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.

_delirium• 16 years ago

The term being used in this way predates Cisco, so I think they'd have trouble enforcing it, especially outside a very narrow use of it.

Here's the 1980 paper where Marvin Minsky coins and explains the term (four years before Cisco was founded, and long before their Telepresence brand): http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Telepresence.html

johnrob• 16 years ago

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

leot• 16 years ago

... 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.

dgallagher• 16 years ago

I can see the headlines now...

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

lukestevens• 16 years ago

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.

city412• 16 years ago

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.

sharvey• 16 years ago

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,

jimbokun2• 16 years ago

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.

nazgulnarsil• 16 years ago

try the movie surrogates.

rsaarelm• 16 years ago

Yeah, there's a dissonance. People stay from being messed up physically and mentally by moving around and keeping their surroundings varied. On the other hand, you keep your mainframe CPU in a nice stable server room, not rolling around on the factory floor where it gets crushed when a bot slips and drops an airplane engine block on it.

What I'm thinking about this is what will it look like 50 or 100 years on, if it catches up. People becoming physically and mentally unwell from staying still is mostly a mechanical problem beyond the lack of changing stimuli and surroundings, and the telepresence rig would provide those.

The low bandwidth thing can get gradually better. The ultimate solution would be some kind of direct neural interface which would give pretty much the same sensory bandwidth as you get from your biological senses, but that would require an entirely new and really difficult to develop technology stack. What we can do now is develop VR and augmented reality technologies. At the operator end, a VR headset or some kind of CAVE environment to give 360° view of the bot's surroundings. At bot end, you could use augmented reality to project an image of the human operator captured from multiple directions as a 3D avatar that shows the operator's body language to people wearing headsets around the bot.

I'm not seeing intrinsic value in people moving around in person, though of course lots of instrumental value which would need to be patched in with technology. There is, on the other hand, value in many people not moving long distances much, in the massive amounts of transportation fuel it would save.

meric• 16 years ago

Hmm, it doesn't have to be my robot... I could rent a robot in Hong Kong from RentARobot for $20 an hour, while staying at work, so I can go visit my grandma or something without having the need to catch a flight. Stay at work and save the plane ticket... Or, visit multiple countries on the same day, if my relatives are spread across the continent.

tlb2• 16 years ago

Most people can't manage to take time off and travel overseas more than once a year. They might see more of the world if it were easier.

Also, there are a lot of elderly, infirm, or handicapped people in the world who can't physically travel.

mseebach3• 16 years ago

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.

aufreak32• 16 years ago

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.

jasonkester• 16 years ago

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.

Ardit203• 16 years ago

That's a good point. I suppose it would have to be an arms race between thieves and the manufacturers. I suppose the robot would not be of much use if you can not control him, although in a place like India where there are plenty of people dying of hunger in the slums I guess the cameras the robot has and audio devices even perhaps the wheels. I mean, why not steel it right?

andrewvc• 16 years ago

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

fizx• 16 years ago

You can do remote vacations today with Google Street View. You can imagine how popular it's become! ;)

antirez• 16 years ago

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."

Ardit203• 16 years ago

It wouldn't replace tourism though same as seeing someone on video does not quite replace seeing them in person.

Frankly, we do not know what they could be used for. Personally, I would not mind being able when I have some free time to have this robot wondering around the pyramids of Egypt for me or Shanghai see how ordinary people live, or preview for example some place I want to go to etc.

halostatue• 16 years ago

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.

njharman• 16 years ago

People say/have said same thing about internet, social networks, cellphones, video games, TV, original rotary phones. About any and every method of communication/interaction that was different enough from the forms of communication/interaction they were accustomed to, comfortable with.

You say people using this to go on remote vacations is sad. I say it's awesome for all the travel phobia's, handicapped, poor, etc. New things are additive, not subtractive. Nothing in this is stopping people from taking taking physical vacations (other than guilt over the amount of pollution air travel causes) it's enabling people to do something they couldn't before.

lutorm• 16 years ago

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.

serichsen• 16 years ago

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.

Rise of the telepresence robots

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