Progress in Telerobotics

A few years ago I thought that the age of telerobotics would have arrived when someone gave a Google tech talk using one, and where the subject of the talk was not robotics related.

Well, that has now happened.

The telerobot is made by Anybots, and there's one obvious noteworthy point: the robot just isn't expressive enough.  Without more capacity for expression, the robot becomes just an uninteresting prop on the stage.  It does have a display, but it's way too small to see the speaker's face.

For telerobots like this the screen needs to be of a similar size to a tablet computer, with face detection used to crop and scale the image in such a way that it's of similar dimensions to a human head.  Then I think the experience for users, or for an audience, would be more interesting.

But of course this is just the start, so I expect that in time those ergonomic modifications will come.