If you can’t make the meeting… send in your robot!
The American company Anybot has created telepresence robots that can be used in variety of scenarios. Whether at home or work, who says you can’t be in two places at once?
A recent article in NPR describes how CEO of Evernote, Phil Libin, keeps an Anybot at his office headquarters in California while he’s not there. That way he’s still able to participate in meetings even while being overseas. Although the use of teleconference has become ubiquitous, devices like Anybots can provide users with a much more comprehensive range of interactions.
In the video above Jake Ludington meets a robot personality who is actually Anybot representative, Angela Ward. The Anybots lack arms so they aren’t capable of picking up any objects however, there is a mechanism on the Anybot that could allow Angela to open a door at the Anybot offices in California while she’s in North Carolina. A set of wheels make them mobile and its two eyes are actually cameras that give the user a realistic visual of what’s going on around the robot. They even have built in lasers which can be used as pointers during presentations.
Telepresence robots aren’t all about the office, they can get down to business in other ways: the video below features ¨Justin,¨ a robot which was recently presented by researchers from the German Aerospace Agency (DLR) at the 2011 International Conference on Humanoid Robots (IEEE-RAS) in Bled, Slovenia. Operated by a human on earth, Justin may eventually find work aboard space stations or satellites.
