Robots have replaced humans on assembly lines, battlefields, space missions and rescue operations. Now how about doing something useful, like sitting through endless meetings for you?
Meet the Anybots QB, a telepresence robot that can represent you in the office by sitting in conference rooms, going to meetings and rolling about through the cubicle farm. The whole time it does so, it displays a live webcam video of your face, while transmitting to you a live video and audio stream of whatever it's looking at.
"The QB is an extension of you," Bob Christopher, chief operating officer of Anybots told Wired.com. "It removes the barriers between people and work so people can teleport themselves to the office space."
Christopher was formerly the chief executive officer of Ugobe, which made the ill-fated Pleo robotic dinosaur toys. Ugobe closed its doors last year, having failed to make a commercial success of its eerily lifelike toys.
QB won't replace video conferencing, says Christopher, but it's a way to look over the shoulder of your colleagues and employees without actually getting into the office. The robot can be manipulated by a user at home or any other location using just a web browser, and can transmit its master's voice and video.
Think of it as a self-propelled Skype-cam on a stick.
A device with Segway-like balancing properties, the QB has two eyes shaped like a bug's that give it an aesthetic similar to Pixar's Wall-E. The cameras (and screen) are mounted atop an adjustable pole, putting them at approximately eye level with your coworkers. QB has eight hours of battery life, supports 802.11g Wi-Fi, comes with a 5-megapixel video camera and a top speed of 3.5 miles per hour. A 320 x 240 LCD screen on QB offers videos and photos, and acts as a control panel.
The $15,000 robot will be available in fall, says Anybots.
Finding ways to make telecommuting easier for office workers or helping teams spread across different locations work together has been a major area of research and product development in robotics. Research firm Gartner estimates the video-conferencing market could grow 17.8 percent between 2008 and 2013, rising from $3.8 billion to $8.6 billion.
Anybots isn't the only company to try mixing telepresence and robots. Companies like iRobot and WowWee tried to capture some part of that business. IRobot announced ConnectR, a Roomba with a video camera, while WowWee's Rovio is a little three-wheeled webcam bot. The ConnectR was quietly killed during the Consumer Electronics Show last year, while Rovio lives on. Willow Garage, a Palo Alto robotics company, has also created a telepresence robot called Texai, though that's not on sale yet.
QB offers a similar experience but makes it more polished – and not so close to the ground. The robot weighs about 35 pounds and its neck can go from 3 feet to 5 feet, 9 inches. And it's easy to use, says Christopher.
Open up a web browser, log in and with just the Up and Down controls on your computer keyboard, you can move the QB around.
The QB has an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and will soon support 3G networks. And because the robot is not tied to one user, it can be used by different employees logging in from an external location, says Christopher.
"Put a QB in the office and anyone who's not there can take the robot and move it over to someone else' desk," he says. "After the first few minutes, people forget they are talking to a robot."
That may be possible, but it is difficult to imagine that most companies will want to purchase many of these robots, no matter what the advantages are. At $15,000 apiece, they don't come cheap.
Check out the video below to see Anybots' QB at work:
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