Remote Presence Links for January 24, 2011

A bit quiet after the past week, but a couple of great links have shown up int he past few days:

  • We Talk With Body Language. So Should Our Cellphones – a nice piece from Aza Raskin, founder of Massive Health and until recently, Creative Lead for Firefox as well as Head of User Experience for Mozilla Labs. My favorite quote from the post:

    We gesture because it’s part of our lexicon. It’s involuntary. And those gestures matter; they really do convey information. Using them wisely in the classroom, for instance, increases the rate of learning and learned material retention. On the phone, though, we do without and use carbon-heavy transit to bridge the physical gap.

  • Continue reading

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Discussing Use Cases for Remote Presence

from Willow Garage websiteThis week, researchers from the University of Massachusetts Lowell (Katherine M. Tsui, Munjal Desai, and Holly A. Yanco) pre-published their findings on use cases of remote presence / telepresence robots in prep for the HRI 2011 conference in Switzerland this March. In their article, they bring up a number of issues that are relevant to the future of remote presence, that are worth reading about.

The research setting was at the Google campus in Mountain View, California. The team was investigating the particular use cases that RPS would work most effectively in – in particular in meetings and in hallways/walking with. While the experiments were relatively short and has some interesting dimensions (e.g. users deciding not to return to using the RPS if they did not like it), I believe many of the teams observations were dead-on – which I summarize below: Continue reading

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Interview w/ Jean Christophe Baillie from GOSTAI

Last week, I had the chance to connect with Jean-Christophe (JC) Baillie, CEO and Founder of GOSTAI and the maker of Jazz, their telepresence robot. In our conversation, JC told me a bit of his history with starting GOSTAI and what he foresees as the future of robotics – how these “teleportation”” systems could be the first real success in robotics beyond vacuum cleaners.

JC and Starting GOSTAI

JC Baille and the GOSTAI Jazz

JC is really into Jazz

JC did his PhD at the Sony Computer Science Lab in Paris, together with the University of Paris, where he first met the Sony Aibo. After his doctorate, he built a lab in Paris at the ENSTA/ParisTech focusing on developmental robotics, and more precisely the emergence of language between robots. During his research, JC had to craft his own OS for controlling the Aibo which was at the center of his research efforts. As he began to show his work and talk about his OS (Urbi), he found that there was a need for a shared OS for building functionality on top of other hardware platforms – and decided to build a company around it.

Today, GOSTAI now has about 20 staff and has extended its product offering to include a visual programming Robot IDE called Gostai Studio, and a robotics cloud computing infrastructure called GostaiNet to remotely handle heavy computational tasks that most robot processors are not addressing due to power or component constraints.

Why Jazz and Why now?

As JC and his team was working with other hardware manufacturers (right now Urbi is on 15 different robotic platforms), he realized that there was a need for a standardized hardware and software platform for people to develop on. So, since his team had built some level of expertise in designing the OS to work with different platforms, GOSTAI decided to create their own. Continue reading

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Remote Presence links for January 19, 2011

Again, a bunch of interesting articles and links by people in the field.

  • Programmed for Love – a very thoughtful article with MIT ethnographer Sherry Turkle warning about the dangers of our continued reliance on technology for our social engagement. In this article, she discusses how robots and the like are potentially going to take over our human interactions with each other since they can be programmed to respond to our human needs – much better than our fellow humans due to our constant distraction by technology. If you understand that, then the article will really catch you. And I am getting her next book.
  • Rundown of Telepresence RobotsMatt Webb of BERG does a quick and dirty rundown of the RPSes he has found in the world today. (Pssst – there are more coming…)
  • What Can You Do With AVA (iRobot’s new telepresence concept robot seen at CES 2011)? – I promise this is the last post regarding the AVA at CES, but I have to thank Frank for getting some better detail from Colin on the specifics of the system. With the normal MSM talking breathlessly over the fact that the AVA was iRobot’s telepresence entry, I was saddened since it seemed woefully inappropriate for the task. But, with greater research, it looks like this was a “spark the imagination” feint, and leave me wondering what will happen next.
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vGo demonstrates an excellent use of remote presence

Into the inbox comes another great link to a story about Lyndon Baty who suffers from Polycystic Kidney Disease and has virtually no immune system. Instead of staying at home, avoiding interaction, vGo is affording Lyndon the chance to be present with his classmates in his high school.

See the video below:

Continue reading

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Could this be the Remote Presence Rocky?

Saw this on the Apple Trailers the other day, and then saw it on Robot Dreams yesterday. I am quite intrigued to see how this show turns out. Looks like they are teleoperated – but not sure if they are only brain operated or kinematically operated.

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Can we create a new term for telepresence robots?

Anybots QAIn the past year, I have spoken with a number of people on the concept of telepresence and telepresence robots – and had an real education on developing language to define a new product/market. Usually, we pay all sorts of smart, wordsmithers to come up with ideas and bring some thoughts to light – and then settle on a new term (or at least the CEO does).

In the past year, I have noted the following terms coming from the different players in the market: Continue reading

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Why does BusinessWeek make dire warnings for the future?

from BusinessWeek

Maybe, this could be YOU?

Into my inbox came my google Alert about another intriguing article about robots in the office. BusinessWeek, source of the CEOs Guide to Robots in the Workplace, has come up with another article on The Robot in the Next Cubicle. Sadly, the article seems to put robots out of reach of the office market, discussing very expensive systems and giving a scary warning that over half of all jobs could be handled by robots by 2030. The author quotes Marshall Brain saying that:

“Management is one area where a dispassionate robot that’s able to disperse tasks and evaluate employee performance in a perfectly rational way might do a better job than a human,” he says.

Continue reading

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Remote Presence links for January 13, 2011

Even though I would love to have news every day for readers of Pilot Presence, I will sometimes bring up some posts/comments I see on other sites for further discussion. For instance:

On hizook, where Travis introed the iRobot AVA, in the comments Frank Tobe from The Robot Report includes his own account of meeting Colin at CES:

I was lucky enough to attend CES and met Colin Angle.
Continue reading

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Why the iRobot AVA is a “concept”, not a product…YET.

In the days after Colin introduced the AVA “concept robot” (as defined by Gerry Caron, director of product management for iRobot), the buzz on the AVA has been superb. Since announcement, the traffic on iRobot and the iRobot AVA has been phenomenal.

But, as reported by MSNBC, Caron states:

“We want to show people a vision of what they can have” at some point with a home robot that’s designed for several uses, Caron said. (Tell them, AVA: “No, I don’t do toilets.”)

And, while the features discussed are quite impressive (as I mention in this post on the AVA), I see some serious design concerns on the device as an effective “presence system”. In this post, let me discuss them further.

UPDATE (1/13): just found BotJunkie’s video on the AVA and a conversation with Mark from iRobot where he clearly states that the AVA is a “technology demonstrator” not a telepresence robot. The idea (from what I gather) is that AVA is showing what is possible from iRobot for discussion sake – and did not want to handicap discussions with constraints for telepresence.

CONCERN 1: Drive Mechanism / Clearance

In all of the videos I’ve seen of the AVA, she moves quite gracefully from one end of the pen to the other.

AVA's Omniwhell base

Ready for the LA Streets

And with its holonomic base (read: can move in any direction equally), she moves quite fluidly. But, my concern is with AVA’s omnidirectional wheels that are in the tripod base.

While omnidirectional wheels provide excellent movement, movement on non-flat surfaces (like a shag carpet) or any form of incline will be quite a challenge. And, as seen in the BotJunkie video below (about the 3:40 mark), the shaky nature of the mecanum-wheels as the AVA moves may cause pilot concerns as the cameras shake with the high-frequency of the wheels vibration.

Floor clearance is another concern (see the distance from the edge of the bottom bumper to the floor); for if there is anything in the way of the AVA, it may have difficulty moving over it. Continue reading

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