This week should be an interesting one, and the links we have today are ones that might be old or interesting to you in this space:
NurseBot courtesy of CMU, U of Pittsburgh and Nursebot Project
- Why I Don’t Like Telepresence Robots – YET – Travis Armstrong, a robotics engineer from Adept Technology spelled out his thoughts on his personal blog (Random Robotics) on his lack of enthusiasm for telepresence robots back in September 2010. We wonder what he thinks about the recent buzz from iRobot and Anybots.
- Q&A: Ken Goldberg Discusses Telerobots, Androids and Heidegger – (IEEE Spectrum) Erico Guizzo published this back in October 2010 and we found it after getting a ping from Robots in the News and in Our Lives forum. What we enjoyed reading was the following quote:
KG: Back then when people like John Canny and Eric Paulos were developing various kinds of telerobots and camera systems, the Internet and wireless networks weren’t as fast and reliable as they are today. Now networks have more bandwidth, better quality of service, lots of error correction. That makes a huge difference. The other thing that has changed is that it’s less expensive to build a robot today, because the components you need are getting better and cheaper. So you’re seeing these companies coming out, like Vgo and Anybots, trying to commercialize these robots. The big question is, When can they get the price down to a point where it’s available to a large number of people? When that happens, things will get very interesting.
For more on that thought, check out Fred Nikgohar’s call for “low cost sensors” on hizook.
- 12 Advances in Medical Robotics – (Information Week) Alison Diana captures a list of recent (and past) systems that help in medicine including the InTouch Health RP7i and the NurseBot from University of Pittsburgh, the University of Michigan, and Carnegie Mellon University.
- When Only a Robotic Video Presence Will Do – (Nashua Telegraph) vGo gives a nice presentation in this article showing off the video and the better glam photos of the product with cofounder/COO Tom Ryden. One part of the interview I found enlightening:
Another major decision was the height of the “face.” It’s roughly at eye level for people in chairs. This makes it slightly awkward to talk to a Vgo for any length of time standing up, but seated meetings are the business world’s most common videoconference format. Further, if it had been much taller, a much larger, heavier base would have been needed for stability, which would have cut down on the battery life.
We can appreciate the tradeoff.
pssst…
Rumor has it that some exciting news about one of the RPS family will be making announcements on their improved solution which is rumored to have HD video, two-way video and even zooming capabilities.