Arrington Gets an Anybot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5ppAM5aPXA

This interpretation is not supported by him pointing a laser near other people's eyes. That was just being an ass. But sticking with the technical side here... a larger field of view might help the driver get those messages. Combining that with some face tracking and magnifying in the driving software would be cool. Or give everyone around a little remote and buttons on the bot for communicating negative feedback anonymously; give an indicator in the diver software, or reduce the mobility of the robot for a minute, or administer electrical shocks to the driver, those sorts of things.

I know that we have certainly moved past that here using them (we use them to keep in communication with our manufacturer). Hopefully having 2 way video + the fact that the robots will be used almost exclusively in business settings will help us avoid the Penny Arcade Internet Fuckwad Theory http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/

You could debate the usefulness of it. It seems like it'd have plenty of interesting applications in business and security..

http://www.anybots.com/

http://anybots.com/#anyblog

I agree that this is way too expensive. I bet, just like the Segway, a lot of the money goes to keeping it on two wheels when a 4 wheel device would do just fine. I'd like to hear the economical justification that a company uses to buy this.

It would be very tough to implement "collision avoidance" without being overbearing on what the user can or cannot do. For example, it would be extremely annoying if the robot's collision avoidance made it actively try to stay away from walls "because the user could potentially make a sudden turn at full speed towards the wall, and then a collision could result, so therefore we should try to avoid that scenario because, damn it, we promised collision avoidance!".

The net effect would be that the user might have a very good reason for wanting to drive close to a wall, but can't because of artificial limits imposed by the software.

It's better to not waste time on those kinds of 'features' and instead focus on making the core experience better. In this case, focusing on the two-way video and reducing chat lag time.

Incidentally, those kinds of 'features' seem like exactly the kind of thing that a mature company would focus on (waste time on) and lose sight of making the actual product better, because it combines so many things that mature companies would like -- delivering on promises to the user, it sounds good on paper, etc. But it loses sight of the fact that the goal is to make the end product better, not to deliver a laundry list of things.