OMG! Is this the Anybots QB at one-tenth the price?!?

Posted on March 28, 2011 by Sanford Dickert

TIPI Control System

Every so often, I find myself smiling when I see positional and motor control loops being diagrammed out for clarity sake. The Telepresence Interface by Pendulum Inversion, or TIPI for short. TIPI is a project from four students at the Mechatronics Engineering Department at the University of Waterloo.

You can see the project website at http://patfairbank.com/tipi learn about the efforts they took to create this system.

While the system is dynamically balancing itself and handling disturbances, I have to agree with a robotic engineer I was speaking to at Inno-Robo that dynamic balancing is more of a distraction for remote presence application. But, with the QB implementation of dynamic balancing, I still can see how first-movers/innovators will be just fine with the balancing system.

(h/t to Dallas Goecker from Willow Garage)

Posted in Anybots QB, Remote Presence Links, Remote Presence Systems | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

A brief couple of snippets through InnoRobo 2011

Posted on March 26, 2011 by Sanford Dickert

So, as you saw on the earlier post, we spent some time at InnoRobo in Lyon. France. To say it was an engaging conference is an understatement. Bruno, the organizer, was a personal dynamo putting together a wonderful program which included a large number of French companies (e.g, GOSTAI, Aldeberan, etc) and had their partner in robotic development, the South Korean government bring a number of their best and brightest to the event (e.g., Yujin Robot Labs).

In the video below, you can catch a couple of snippets of what we saw at the event.

And more to come – including a talk with Colin Angle from iRobot about his point-of-view on remote presence systems and his vision for AVA.

Posted in AVA, GOSTAI, iRobot, Remote Presence News | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A brief couple of snippets through InnoRobo 2011

Not an Apple Robot and Notes from InnoRobo

Posted on March 24, 2011 by Sanford Dickert
Not an Apple Robot

Could it be from iRobot?

Okay – so it looks like the video is not from Apple – if Aaron is to be believed – so we are going to get into deep investigation start investigating who this provider is. When we find out more, we will endeavor to post the news as soon as possible.

Today, I am in Lyon, France for InnoRobo – one of the best robotics conferences I have ever seen. Think of MakerFaire with a polish like CES without the annoying overhype. After spending last week at SxSW, this event has a similar vibe – muted with the typical European style.

I have loads of great content coming from players like Yujin Robotics, GOSTAI, EOS Innovation and so on – and was at the presentation where Colin Angle was awards an achievement award (I forgot the name), but thought you’d like to see the award – even if the video is not perfect yet.

As I get more information, I promise to update this post.

Posted in GOSTAI, Jazz Connect, Remote Presence News, Remote Presence Systems, ROBOSEM, RPS Companies, Yujin Robot | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Is Apple Building Robots Now?

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Sanford Dickert

Okay, this is a strange one. We got sent this snippet of video of an unidentified robot moving in a room. The picture is grainy and pixelated which could just be a way of hiding features of it.

Now, we must admit, it has lines that remind us of Apple products, but we are surprised that someone would send the video to us first (instead of our friends at the IEEE Automation Blog or Plastic Pals).

What do you think?

Posted in Remote Presence News | Tagged , | 6 Comments

@SXSW – been away from the computer…

Posted on March 15, 2011 by Sanford Dickert

Dear readers – we’ve been getting emails about where we have disappeared to. We are enjoying the circus that is SXSW Interactive and will have some amazing content for you in the coming week from InTouch Health and VGo with some hands-on content.

And keep sending your leads and stories in – we are growing our team and getting more people behind this effort.

Posted in Public Service Announcement | Tagged , , | Comments Off on @SXSW – been away from the computer…

Social Robotic Telepresence and HRI 2011

Posted on March 11, 2011 by Sanford Dickert
Social Robotic Telepresence Workshop

Gathered around the Giraff

So, as I was drafting up my links, I realized I had not dove into some of the workshops that happened at HRI 2011 – especially one I found quite interesting: Social Robotic Telepresence. The Social Robotic Telepresence workshop schedule seems to have heavily focused on the use of RPSes in elder care, but one of the sessions was particularly interesting: Evaluation of Social Robotic Telepresence.

In this session, three papers were presented. One, by Kate Tsui who we have mentioned before and listed in our Remote Presence Links yesterday closed off the session. The first two are ones I wanted to bring up today.

Effectiveness of RPS in Elder Care

The first paper called “Towards Evaluation of Social Robotic Telepresence based on Measures of Social Richness and Spatial Presence (pdf)” is a discussion on how the use of the Giraff RPS may or may not be effective in elder care. Of the three metrics that were tracked, experimentally they determined that:

  1. the caregivers (or pilots) had a very realistic sense of the reality the RPS was in (IMO meaning they knew where everything was, how high everything was, what was in the way, etc)
  2. the caregivers and the elders (or participants) were better able to communicate with each other, and
  3. both the caregivers and the elders did not think they could emotionally influence the other as effectively (my interpretation) as they could in person.

As a user of over five RPSes and having many experiences working with them in a business situation, I can attest to each of these points personally.

“Now I have a body!”

The second paper is from Min Kyung Lee from Carnegie Mellon University and Leila Takayama from Willow Garage entitled “‘Now, I have a body’: Uses and social norms for mobile remote presence in the workplace” is a personal favorite. In this paper, the Willow Garage Texai is used as the Mobile Robotic Telepresence (MRP) or RPS in our lingo. Unfortunately, you have to download the entire proceedings to get it (UPDATE: the link for the individual one is NOW working).

To say this paper is meaty is an understatement. This paper is a rich treasure-trove of insights into the issues and futures of remote presence. Some of these insights include: Continue reading →

Posted in Elder care, Giraff, Industries, Remote Presence Research, Remote Presence Systems, Texai | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Social Robotic Telepresence and HRI 2011

Remote Presence Links for March 10, 2011

Posted on March 10, 2011 by Sanford Dickert

Been a relatively quite week this week – our friends at VGo, Anybots and iRobot seem to have quieted down their PR blitz and are focusing on getting products to customers. So, today is a run down of some excellent links I have seen in the past week and some more intriguing content on remote presence.

Posted in Remote Presence Links, Remote Presence News | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Interview w/ Jeremy Parsons from Mantaro

Posted on March 3, 2011 by Sanford Dickert

Earlier this week, I spent an hour speaking with Jeremy Parsons, co-founder of Mantaro Engineering Product Development Services and the visionary behind the MantaroBot. Jeremy spent a good deal of time with me discussing his history, his first attempt at telepresence robots and how the MantaroBot came to being this year.

Meet Jeremy

Jeremy Parsons and the MantaroBot

He is proud of his product!

Jeremy’s background starts at the University of Maryland where he was a Technology Management graduate who spent a great deal of time at Telecommunications Techniques Corporation, (now JDSU) primarily focusing on telecommunications test equipment. It was during his 14 years at TTC that he met his future business partner, Gabriel Mayo. In 1995, the two of them spun out of TTC and formed Synatpyx Corporation as a bespoke engineering firm for the telcommunications industry. As many entrepreneurs before them, Gabriel and Jeremy began to see product opportunities as they worked with their clients. One of these products became a best selling product that drew the attention of Telco Systems which subsequently acquired their company. After two years, the parent company began to cost-reduce and shut down the Synaptyx office which caused Jeremy and Gabriel got to start again.

MantaroBot: Take One

Jeremy told me that the MantaroBot we see today is not the first of its kind. Twenty years ago, Jeremy was already thinking about building a robotic telepresence, but the the technology at the time was far too cumbersome to achieve what he had envisioned for robotic telepresence.

In early 2000, Jeremy saw the first glimmer of what could help create a consumer-based product. Watching the proliferation of Instant Messenger clients like AOL and Yahoo! which began offering both voice and video on their clients, he thought “Could this support the audio/video we need?”
Continue reading →

Posted in Mantaro, MantaroBot, Remote Presence News, Remote Presence Systems, RPS Companies | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Interview w/ Jeremy Parsons from Mantaro

Is iPad 2 the future of mobile telepresence?

Posted on March 3, 2011 by Sanford Dickert

Facetime on the iPad

Future of Mobile Presence?

With yesterday’s announcement of the iPad 2 with front and rear facing cameras, the world may have stepped that one step forward into making mobile telepresence or mobile video conferencing a commonplace for business and consumers.

But waitaminute, didn’t iPhone 4 offer this a year ago? And they launched the Facetime for Mac recently as well. Why would the iPad 2 make such a wave?

Well, watching the market for mobile telepresence (and please note, we are not talking about remote presence), you can see the various pieces of kit that are currently being offered for ease of use and mobile video conferencing. From the Cisco Cuis to the various video chat software apps on mobile phones (like the qik app for the htc phones), the idea of talking into a device that acts as a portal to another physical location is going to become more and more commonplace.

iRobot AVA Head

iPad above the pilot's camera which results in overlooking the pilot

As we saw with the iRobot AVA, the iPad could be an excellent interface for the “head” of a telepresence robot, but the coding and resolution of this device would take time to work out (e.g., what is the focal length, could you zoom, what about low-light conditions).

But I can easily see some quick efforts that allow someone to hook up an iPad with the iRobot Create (like I saw from a CMU-Silicon Valley student) and make a desktop/conference table robotic telepresence which will allow an individual to manage the direction an iPad is looking. Granted, this is a more expensive motorized camera mount and an LED screen, but I believe that as people get more and more familiar with face-to-face or “portal creating” from these devices, the adoption of RPSes will be much faster than others perceive.

Posted in AVA, iRobot, Remote Presence Issues, Remote Presence Systems, RPS Companies | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Seeing the invisible wifi strengths

Posted on March 1, 2011 by Sanford Dickert

While not discussing robotics or teleconferencing, this lovely video and the photos found on the artist’s website give a glimpse of the issues that face remote presence systems as we see objects traveling within a physical space. The signal strengths are just one concern that a RPS unit may have, and this video is an excellent representation of that invisible signal in space.

(h/t to O’Reilly Radar)

Posted in Remote Presence Issues | Tagged , | Comments Off on Seeing the invisible wifi strengths