Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve been covering telepresence robots for years, but those that have materialized aren’t exactly within most people’s budget. However, if all you need is some way to rotate your view on the other end of the line, then you may consider Revolve Robotics’ KUBI. With six days left and just over $27,000 away from the $50,000 goal (the team was able to knock 50 percent off the original goal), this Indiegogo project hopes to offer a relatively affordable and simple telepresence solution for existing tablet users. The KUBI itself is essentially a tablet mount that can do a 300-degree pan plus 90-degree tilt, and the prototypes we saw featured two spring-loaded aluminium arms that elegantly pinches the tablet — we’ve been told that they can even fit Microsoft’s Surface in landscape. The robot is pretty much platform-agnostic as long as the tablet supports Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy, which is how the robot receives its motion commands.

Continue reading Revolve Robotics’ KUBI spins your tablet around for teleconferences, we go hands-on

Filed under: Robots

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Source: Revolve Robotics

PanaCast from Altia is a prototype that could change the HD video conferencing game forever. Although our screens typically use 16:9 or 4:3 ratios, the human field of view is much larger than that (especially if you count the peripheral vision), so the idea of ultra wide screen video conferencing is not new. System have been devised to give the impression that the other part “is here”, but they tend to cost tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

PanaCast is a kickstarter project that aims at changing the game by several order of magnitude. The company has the Panacast Camera, a 200 degree wide multi-lenses device that can shoot six streams of video simultaneously and stitch them in real-time into one contiguous ultra-wide HD video stream. (more…)

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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.

The robot requires three components, the robotic device itself, the client software, and the Beam Docking Station. The docking station is where the remote user parks the robot to recharge. The bot stands 62-inches tall and weighs 95 pounds. It has a 17-inch screen that shows the operator’s life-sized face to be displayed – assuming your head will fit on a 17-inch screen.

The Beam’s internal rechargeable battery is a good for up to eight hours of use and the robot can cruise around at 1.5 m/s. The robot has an integrated wireless radios for control and has a pair of HD cameras providing a 170° field of view vertically and horizontally. The robot also has a microphone array with six microphone beams to eliminate background noise and echo. It also has an integrated speaker system with LED lamps for lowlight operation.

With much cheaper options coming in a few months, and others coming soon, I’m not sure of the market for a $16,000 telepresence ‘bot, but it’s just more evidence that with time we’re going to start seeing robots roaming the halls sooner rather than later.