Telepresence Robots – An Interview With Double Robotics | Hacker News Reader

Telepresence Robots – An Interview With Double Robotics

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37 pointsMintChocoisEw51 comments

Reminded of this article in The Economist: https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2013/03/09/yo...

With this hilarious closing paragraph:

> A telepresence robot sheathed in rubbery skin is being sold to researchers by Japan’s Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International. Resembling an androgynous and legless child with short, handless arms, Telenoid, as it is called, is essentially a large humanoid phone. The idea is that lonely grandparents “feel the human presence” of relatives who speak through it while remotely moving its head and other body parts, says the project’s leader, Hiroshi Ishiguro. But this creepy robot is unlikely to catch on outside Japan, says Timo Kaerlein, a German researcher who studied Telenoid on a visit to Kyoto. One observer described it as a nightmarish, fetus-like “demon-spawn”. By comparison, having your disembodied boss drive up to your desk for a quick chat seems reassuringly normal.

I was curious what it looked like, so did some digging and turned up this: https://www.engadget.com/2010/08/02/hiroshi-ishiguro-creates...

Creepy indeed.

Without subscribing I can't see the paragraph you copied, so I can't tell if there's an image with it, but there needs to be. I thought surely "nightmarish, fetus-like “demon-spawn”" was hyperbole. It is not.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Telenoid&client=firefox-b-1-...

And the videos are even worse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7t4uczfbZY

I would not be surprised to see it attack someone and then Bruce Campbell pops out and slices it up with his chainsaw.

Hoo boy. This seems to be the worst aspects of the Bobiverse[1] without any of the benefits. If my future is to be an iPad on a stick, can I at least get to go to the stars? :)

[1] We Are Legion, Dennis E Taylor - thoroughly recommended, along with his other SciFi.

I like some of the applications of this product, but as a long term remote worker this seems kind of silly to use for remote IT work.

Video calls through Slack have worked really well and I find it motivates people to do some preliminary research before they reach out; as opposed to inter-office interactions where co-workers might inconsiderately interrupt work frequently with trivial questions.

I would think a virtual office environment in VR would be another (and cheaper) strategy for this, but I understand wearing headgear for extended periods of time comes with some consequences.

I do think this is a good step forward in terms of technological progress however.

No, I don't think I need a robot on wheels to roam the office and join a meeting room when I can just join a video call.

All the tech for remote work is here already, all we need is a change in mentality to get wider acceptance of remote work.

I agree that those robots on wheels seem pretty silly whenever I've seen them but:

>All the tech for remote work is here already

I'm not sure collaboration software/hardware is really there yet. It incrementally improves and at least part of the problem is probably getting widespread adoption of some specific solutions.

But working on something collaboratively in a conference room versus remotely is still a lot better for certain things. Mind you, I don't think tech can ever get all the way there for some purposes but it feels as if we can still do better than we do.

> But working on something collaboratively in a conference room versus remotely is still a lot better for certain things

Can you please provide examples? Between Zoom, BlueJeans, and other conferencing software, I've yet to run into any collaboration issues that would have been solved by office visits. There's also the fact that most conferences now use screen-sharing as the default means of presenting, with many attendees calling in from their office desks.

The biggest problems I've encountered are usually centered around lazy or ignorant usage of the tools. For example people dialing in from some noisy environment with the mic on by default. This is becoming less of a problem though as it's no longer taboo to call them out for their negligence.

Do they have a replacement for whiteboards and sticky notes? Those are one of the biggest things that I haven't seen a solution for yet.

You can whiteboard in zoom.

You can sketch on a touch-enabled device which is not quite the same thing as people working things out on big conference room whiteboards.

That said, people could probably use tablets more systematically for sharing hand-drawn/written stuff in real time. Some of it is about adjusting to the realistically available tools as well. For large meetings where some people have to be remote, for example, we've switched things that we would have historically probably written on a whiteboard to shared docs online.

All the tech might exist, but it's going to take a lot more than a change in mentality. My organization has tons of cool toys that are designed to enable remote meetings. Every time we try to use them something goes wrong and even the people who attended multi-day formal training on the system can't get it to work. So instead we just use plain old telecons with moderate audio quality and no visual feedback at all.

> My organization has tons of cool toys that are designed to enable remote meetings. Every time we try to use them something goes wrong ...

I would argue that is not the tech that was referred to.

What is that tech then? The primary factor that keeps me from switching to full-time remote is the poor UX for remote meetings in my organization.

Even with Zoom, Slack, BlueJeans, etc., there's an incredible amount of communication fidelity lost compared to in-person meetings. Running effective and productive in-person meetings is already hard enough and something that many companies struggle or fail at; adding in all this other imperfect technology to facilitate remote meetings makes it even harder. And this is assuming you've got the logistics of using the software down perfectly. If you're fumbling around with the software even once or twice a week to get a meeting off the ground, you're even further behind in-person teams.

Okay, sure. But this doesn't solve any of those issues. If anything it compounds them.

I don't buy that, I have full time remote staff and our meetings are the same irrespective of if everyone is on location or all remote. Workout your process if it's not working. I can agree that meeting with someone you have never met before would be more effective in-person over remote. However a team that meets often can easily iron out the kinks and figure out what works for them.

> incredible amount of communication fidelity lost compared to in-person meetings.

Yes, but is it critical ?

Do you really need that high fidelity interaction everyday of the week, all month ?

I feel a lot of strategies can be used to mitigate the need for that much bandwidth and hi-fi interactions. There’s orgs where some people working together only meet once a week or once a month.

If I remember well github teams only physically meet once every many months.

There are of course downsides to that, but the upsides (e.g. living a healthy life) can compensate them largely enough.

It's critical for politicking with people that don't internet so good. As a remote worker, that's the main thing I can't do. Some people can only form connections in person.

Having worked at half a dozen remote companies and a bunch of companies where I'm on site in the office I can tell you this from experience.

People in general suck at communication.

Those teams that are the most productive and produce the most - those that produce 10, 20 or 100 times more value than average teams do one thing really well that all the others suck at. Communication. They gel together well and produce a lot because they communicate well.

I've had a handful of experiences of working on teams that have 10X-100X productivity and I've loved working on every single one of them. They all had flawless and free flowing communication, whether you were in the office or remote, you were always kept in the loop. Their infrastructure was designed to facilitate ease of communication whether you were at your desk, in a meeting room, at home or on a beach 1,000 miles away.

Every single one of them, without exception designed their businesses to facilitate communication before they thought about anything else and every single one of them didn't skip a beat if everyone was in the office or the whole team was working from home, or even in the same time zone... and they don't need telepresence robots to assist with that.

Those that don't communicate well don't produce even when everyone's together in the office. Telepresence robots aren't going to help them communicate. We tried a device that was like an iPad on a Segway when I was at Kobo. It was a hilarious gimmick for a couple of weeks before we all decided it was stupid and went back to Bluejeans/Slack which was more than sufficient to communicate effectively.

And what happens when there are more telepresence robots than actual people? Is there even any point to having that office?

This is one of those things that'll get even more silly, the more popular it gets.

So many nay-sayers here. At my previous job we actually owned 2 of these robots, and although a bit gimmicky they worked great for us for a few reasons:

1) It was surprising how much more engaged and engaging someone was when connected to a meeting than on a typical video conference screen hidden in a small corner. People who connected "on the double" paid way more attention to meetings, and when they had something to contribute, people paid them more attention.

2) We could get up and start writing / brainstorming on physical whiteboards we had set up around the meeting rooms and remote guests could move around and inspect the ideas in a much more natural way (the caveat of course being that they couldn't scribble too, but this rarely seemed to be a problem)

3) We also ran a lab, and we could easily give tours to remote guests of our lab and office space, something that would have been awkward at best in any other way, and at least one tour we gave this way brought in far more money than the robot cost

4) It was a very handy way to check in on things at the lab—student needs help with something late at night? Sign in to the double and go look at what's going on. Something triggered a security alarm but our security cameras couldn't quite reach? Connect on the double and go investigate.

There were of course downsides—some people seemed incapable of driving the robot, and it wasn't great at crossing the threshold between carpet and lino (someone once managed to tip the robot over), but overall it was quite successful.

I worked at a place that had a "BeamPro", it was alright. More fun and convenient than video conferencing.

https://www.suitabletech.com/products/beam-pro

From the title, I thought this might be about tele-operators for litter-bots to pick up litter or something.

There's also the Human Uber[1] which is a human with an IPAD on their face going around the office for you.

[1]https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/paq7xb/human-uber-ipad-ma...

Is this a joke? It's hard to think of anything more dehumanizing than this.

Anybots had telepresence robots up and running back in 2009, several years before Double Robotics was founded: https://anybots.com/

While the technology is interesting, it doesn't really seem to have taken the world by storm.

Yes, a lot of this is marketing, but I'm a little surprised all the naysayers here don't really address any of the issues brought up in the video. That is, the benefit of having more spontaneous conversations (if desired), the "talking to you vs. talking over you" that happens in conf calls, the ability for the remote person to move and manipulate the robot to get a better view (has no one had the "wait just a minute Bob, we know you can't see the whiteboard right now, but we'll send you a picture when we're done" experience in a meeting?)

I'd be more interested to hear the experiences of people who've actually used something like this than the folks who are summarily dismissing it without giving it much thought.

I worked remotely for a company in SF that had one of these robots. I mostly used it to play games with people by chasing them through the hallway. When I did park it in the corner of the room people would either forget it was there or get distracted by it and start giggling. I guess if there were one for each worker and they were used regularly it would provide the benefit of being able to overhear office conversations, but the microphone had a really hard time picking up conversations that weren't immediately next to it, and honestly one of the things I like about remote work is not having to listen to my co-workers talking about their keto diet.

The spontaneity will be the initial jokes and pranks for a week, then it'll be spooking people into uncanny valley.

Video chat and real life are a chasm that isn't going to be bridged by some dinky segway with a tablet on it.

Robot on a stick doesn't do alot. I speak from experience using a telepresence robot at work to interact with my boss. It's basically a walking tablet that can't really navigate because it's wrapped in a consumer toy grade vehicle system to meet price point. Just pay an intern to hold a phone up and walk around. I agree that telepresence is the future of remote work, and by work I mean physically moving atoms around not just using social media to exchange information. The trick is creating reliable and efficient robotic systems that are actually suitable to the types of work needed. Thats not so easy and why I work in robotics. Lots of problems to solve.

The boss bot should be a drone so that it can hover.

This is just silly. It is a transition idea of an old paradigm to a new world where people are lagging behind. If nothing else, we are going to be in virtual spaces / augmented ones where amazing visuals / interactions can happen. They certainly cannot happen in this pitiful looking stick on wheels with an ipad. It dehumanizes the person on the stick and just looks stupid. Come on.

Based on what? What a manufacturer of said robots claims?

This is nothing more than marketing fluff.

Communication remains the hardest problem in Software Engineering and despite all the I do not think remote = onsite is the same thing. We might reach there in 2-3 years but today is not that time.

I have worked as a remote engineers and have hired remote engineers. There are scaling issues and then there are life satisfaction issues. While many people think that being with their families and familiar location might be good for them it does not turn out to be the same.

No they're not. This is a solution looking for a problem. If you're going to control a robot in the office, you better be controlling it to do actual physical work like adding paper to the printer or something of that manner. Video conference is the future of remote work for communication, what most people haven't figured out is a good process/flow to make it effective.

My office has stairs.

One of the labs that I visit frequently has Beams for people to use. They've been on a multi-year kick to make the lab "Beam-able." That means, no extension cords, no floor outlets, no ramps, or edges on the floor of any kind. While in theory the ability to move around should make the interaction better, it seems that the mobility is so poor, that people generally get to one location and then just stop trying because it took so much effort to get there. It's also hugely distracting if someone is in a beam trying to get a better view because the inevitably run into something, or get stuck, and then need help. Elevators also turn out to be pretty big traps.

This sounds so comical, but I imagine it gets old fast.

https://i0.wp.com/digitalgap.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/...

A bit disappointed that nobody talks about the environmental impact.

Remote work --> good, better than commuting.

Telepresence Robots --> horrible, one more battery powered, electronic filled, 2 years life span manufactured thing.

We have to learn to use LESS material things.

This thing might be good for a hospital or sth, but remote work is not at all about remote-controlled bots. There are plety of conferencing tools doing a better job of providing presence.

...says a company making telepresence robots, aka iPads on sticks.

Hard pass.

A thought experiment:

If the entire team is remote then does it make sense for the company to rent a room, say 1 per team, and fill it with such robots, 1 per person for social interaction?

I'm assuming the answer is no.

What about a team where everyone except 1 person is remote, does it make sense to have this for everyone and put it in the room with the non-remote person?

I believe the answer is still no.

Continuing...

Now, how about if half the team is remote? I'm assuming the answer is still no.

Continuing....

Then, how about the entire team is on-site, except 1 person. Do we need a robot for 1 person who is remote?

If the answer is still no, then there is no need for such a product.

While reading the article, I envisaged a comedy sketch with a lavish office entirely populated by telepresence robots.

They are just too goofy, maybe putting a pair of Google Glass on each robot would make them more appealing?

No, office work will take on more of the practices of remote work, not the other way around.

Yeah, don't think so.

I hope not.

yeah, right

nah

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