Tag: Telepresence

Technabob has written about Pepper before, and the words published were the mixture of disgust and fear that only the uncanny valley and faux-telepathic robots can inspire. The basic premise is that this eerie, white robot’s soulless and vacant black eyes are always studying you and reading for signs of weakness your emotions (for signs of weakness).

The ALS ice bucket challenge seems to live on and on and on. Someone always has a new twist to how they do the challenge, entertaining us all over again. Now it is SoftBank’s turn.

I feel immense guilt every morning when I say goodbye to Burrito, my hyper-energetic Pomeranian. There’s just something about his puppy dog eyes that make me want to stay home and play with him all day instead… which I unfortunately can’t do if I want to keep my job.

Seeing a doctor can be a pain sometimes. It’s painful and inconvenient enough to be sick as it is. What’s even worse is having to sit at a doctor’s office for hours on end and wait for the receptionist to call your name.

The company that became known for its humble robots for cleaning homes will soon be selling a fancy robot for offices. Coming in 2014, iRobot’s Ava 500 will let you work both remotely and on site.

iRobot makes robots for all sorts of needs in the military and other business areas. In the consumer space, the company is probably best known for its line of robotic vacuum cleaners, including the Roomba and Scooba.

Thanks to the Internet, the “office” is no longer a strictly physical location. I’m working from home right now, wearing clothes that even a bum would find distasteful. Despite this awesome setup, we can still do better.

If you have $16,000 lying around and I hankering to virtually cruise the halls of some distant office, Suitable Technologies has something suitable that it has just debuted. The company has new telepresence robot called the Beam Remote Presence System or Beam RPS.

Devon Carrow is a fairly normal kid, except for the fact that his allergies are so severe that he has been compared to David Vetter, the boy who inspired the film The Boy In the Plastic Bubble.

Telepresence robots seem to be something that some people are starting to look at, and that’s one of the reasons why two Princeton students, Tianlong Wang and Xinyi Chen created the Helios robot. It turns your smartphone into a mobile telepresence rig for far less than other solutions.

Telepresence robots let you remotely interact with others and their environments using a robotic avatar. Sadly, for most geeks telepresence robots are typically far from cheap. A company called Double Robotics has unveiled a new telepresence robot that is relatively inexpensive for the market, even if it still costs nearly $2000.

If you want to share the world around you with your friends, but your friends aren’t there with you, then just put your friend on your shoulder – thanks to a robot surrogate. Researchers at Yamagata University are working to build a miniature humanoid that could one day let a robotic version of your friends sit on your shoulder and point at things.

With improvements in connectivity and video cameras, teleconferencing solutions have improved dramatically in just the past decade. And while there have been some attempts to create telepresence robots that let you interact with people at remote locations, it’s still not quite the same as being there.

DARPA has chopped $7 million out of its budget for program it’s is calling “Avatar.” Yes, DARPA is talking about that Avatar. Rather than growing the towering blue aliens that James Cameron had in his awesome science fiction movie, DARPA wants robots.

You’ve heard of telepresence, where you can attend meetings while not actually there by using a robot proxy, but using a robot proxy to play with Fido is a new one to me. That’s just what Jordan Correa and his wife have done here.

The OriHime robot was developed in Japan by Kentaro Yoshifuji, an engineering student at Waseda University, and it attempts to takes the robotic form to a sexy new level. While it has a more feminine form than the typical ‘bot, it definitely won’t be putting Victoria’s Secret models out of a job anytime soon.