Tele-presence begins in the office.

From New Scientist Tech Blog:

Finally, they found a more suitable remote-controlled platform made by Super Droid Robots, and mounted everything on top of it, at head-height, using a pole.

The result is a pretty interesting real-life experiment in robotic telepresence, and both Bowman and his co-workers seem to be happy with the arrangement. He can easily wheel IvanAnywhere into someone’s office for a quick chat and attend meetings in different parts of the office. The only problem so far was when people forgot to plug the robot in for an overnight recharging.

“I was wandering the halls at night looking for somebody to plug me in,” Bowman says.

I like the bit about crashing into people’s shins as he careened around the office in one of their prototypical solutions. I myself would have just stopped there, maybe added some spikes in the front or something. Then again I have been noted for my misanthropic tendencies (why do think we work with robots and not people?).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Robot Overlords. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.