Robotic Presence For a Telecommuter

McGregorMortis writes "Ivan lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and telecommutes to work in Waterloo, Ontario. But in meetings, speaker-phones suck: can't hear everybody, can't move around, no visual contact. So Ivan made an IvanAnywhere robot to give him a physical presence in the office. If Ivan wants to talk to a coworker, he just steers radio-controlled IvanAnywhere into that person's office for a chat."

Video conferencing no use?

[Colin Smith]

The best way I've seen it done is with a big screen, it looks like the two rooms are joined in the middle when it's running.
 

That's really an avatar!

[Anonymous Coward]

Great achievement! If it becomes common I bet on the birth of a skin and cloths market not unlike the one for the avatars in Second Life.

Re:Video conferencing no use?

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFA -- the problem is that people have conversations all over the place, and the telecommuter wants to be able to participate. You can't get people to hang out in front of the VC unit all the time; they're going to strike up a conversation in an office or a hallway. There are too many places for you to put cameras and screens everywhere, and if you did, you'd freak the hell out of people.

With the robot, if he hears an interesting conversation in the distance, he can have the robot wander over so he can join in. Or he can have the robot wander the halls and talk to people as he bumps into them (literally or figuratively).

IOW, the VC tech is adapting to the way people work, instead of the other way around.

Good application for iRobot Create

[rickkas7]

Great idea! It seems to me that the iRobot Create [irobot.com] would be a good base for making something like this. It has all of the sensors for stopping when running into things and not falling down stairs. It might even still have the sensors and logic to find its home charging base by itself, eliminating the need to have people in the office remember to charge it nightly.

There's even the PackBot model for dealing with people who have really, really messy offices, but that's probably out of my price range.

Big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the point of a robot if it doesn't have some kind of weapon? Come back when it can electrocute people from 50 metres.

Re:Why don't they share?

[JaredOfEuropa]

If everyone is going to have one of those robots, why not have virtual robots? In other words, an avatar in a virtual environment. That's precicely what I am involved in at the moment; we're experimenting with virtual conferences in (please don't laugh) Second Life. Our initial take on it is that virtual meetings are not as good as actually being there, but they are a damn sight better than teleconferencing (which sits way down on the list somewhere between getting a root canal treatment, and dropping a kitchen knife on your bare foot pointy side down). They also give much more of a sense of "presence" than videoconferencing. Plus, they allow for teambuilding events as well.

Sadly my suggestion for renting a virtual meeting room in Sauron's tower (in Lord of the Rings Online) was voted down. Oh well...

Visitors

[deniable]

It could be fun to introduce him to visitors. "This is Ivan."

What does the robot do when Ivan goes to the toilet? Does it hang out in the mens room? Actually, I've had meetings in there. They're short and don't involve a lot of paperwork. And no bloody Powerpoint.

Re:Erm...

[CodyRazor]

ok iv noticed this trick works well for increasing post rating: 'il probably get moded flamebait but...' man youd make the worst boss... It sounds like your a bean counter type who immediatly sees the lack of 'productivity' in any new idea. A bit of humor, some new ideas and some novelty go a long way in a workplace, and do a lot more for morale and productivity than robot-like efficiency ever could.

Re:Good application for iRobot Create

[Lumpy]

Actually a friend of mine did it years ago already. He lived in Benton Harbor, MI. so when heathkit kicked the bucket he was able to purchase enough surplus parts to build 3 Hero2000 robots. He used them at work, well more as telepresence robots... he did not have the logic boards so we used old mini formfactor Pentium 233 processor boards. using parallel ports we were ableto control the robot's functions. a second parallel port used a B&W logictech Quickcam and we had several IR led's around the quickcam from remotes we canabalized for "night vision".

the set up a charging station of 2 copper pads the robot was steered over to connect to a 24VAC power supply to charge the lead acid batteries. we used old IBM ISA wireless network cards and a second PC set up as a ethernet to wireless gateway.

We used these robots to successfully reboot and restart equipment 156 miles away in a dark headend in the middle of nowhere. They ran linux and worked perfectly even with joker headend techs covering the camera with a rag or the funniest one was a couple of straws and a photo of the room from that point of view. No matter where we turned the head the view stayed. preplexed us for 20 minutes until we noticed a sliver of the screen changed when we moved, the photo was not framed right.

Problem with irobot create is the same problems we had. no good charging setup that can be used without human intervention. way too low skirts to get tripped up on wires, wheels actually too small, etc...

and the iRobot Create is insanely too expensive for what it is.

Re:Let's put it this way

[demi]

Do you actually telecommute full time? Or are you blowing it out your hole because you like to type?

Telecommuting full time isn't like staying home a day or two a week. It's much more disconnected. We're not talking about the social aspects of working (although that's part of it--part of what you do at work is reinforce your opinions of those you work with, and read their opinions of you. It's too bad you've missed this--but it doesn't surprise me, you don't exactly sound like a 'thinker'); we're talking about what physical presence brings into it. You'd have to be supremely inobservant not to understand that people get each other's attention physically, that physical presence is the nexus of a great deal of getting things done in an office, and that being physically disconnected is really distancing from what's going on there.

Video conferencing, shared terminal sessions, conference calls (ugh), phone, IM, email are all really poor at enabling actual work to get done (in my experience, the best is email and some kind of shared authoring system; while no one ever actually gets things done on conference calls and video conferences). Is a robot perfect? No. And sometimes physical distance can be a benefit as well as a hindrance, if you play it right. But if you think that planning and setting up video conferences with a telecommuter is the same thing as asynchronously getting individual's attention via physical presence, well... then you haven't thought much, have you?