Remote Presence - after the novelty, effective presence happens.

Today's articles (both video and print) in the NYTimes presented a number of perspectives on remote presence. In the main article, Markoff does a great overview of the different plays within the remote presence space. As you can see in the video that accompanies it, the use of our remote presence system (RPS) at Mozilla demonstrates just one of a number of effective uses of an RPS.

In the Pogue and Bilton video as well as the Bilton post, however, the story of remote presence effectiveness seems lost while the novelty of the RPS roaming the halls is made primary - which loses the intent behind remote presence.

Framing the RPS in a different way

Imagine if you were a 7" tall individual, starting a job at a new office. Imagine the looks that people might given you as you appeared in the conference rooms, cafeteria or around the corner. Without an initial introduction, the surprise by coworkers is not at all surprising. Now, imagine if you suddenly walked around the corner and came face-to-face with this:

You too may have a strange reaction to a moving screen with someone's face on it.

Texas Alpha Robot - Report #3

Last weekend, Dallas and Curt worked insanely into the night with our friends at Function and had a late-night delivery of the first 20 Texai into the office. As you can see on the homepage of Willow Garage, they were all sitting there - waiting for the chargers and such.

As you can see in this thread of photos, the Texai Team did an excellent job building them out. We had a timeframe of 3 months, and delivered the final seven four days later. One thing that was funny was when we delivered the first 20 - Dallas and Curt had worked so late in the night that they decided to do some fun photos that could be the Jobs/Woz style. But, we like to think of them as Woz/Woz.

Texas Alpha Robot - Report #2

So, in the past month or so, progress has moved inexorably forward on Texas Alpha (or TA for short). Since the last report, our design partner (Function) has been hard at work making sure that all of the parts were in.

Off-the-Shelf Parts and Bad Timelines
One of the important aspects on this project has been to make sure the TAs were seen as "modifyable" - allowing anyone with an Allen wrench and some confidence to switch out parts and connect them to the robot whenever possible. The idea is to see what users would do with the robot, once given the source code (found here) and the physical system.

The method to do this was to use off-the-shelf parts while we made the custom parts from other outside sources. The funny thing is: you'd expect the custom parts to take much longer than the catalog parts. That is not the case, as we discovered. We had to wait insane amounts of time - and people seemed not to know what one hand was doing from the other. Suffice it to say, next time - we might be considering other components for our next TA build.

From the Ground Up

Once we got the parts in house, the build of the subassemblies has been fast and furious. As you can see from the slideshow, we have at least two of the TAs built and are replicating them quite rapidly. The funniest part of this effort is the fact that we might not have enough storage for all 25 of the TAs in the office as we are building them. But, we have a number of eager people wanting to work with them in the Bay Area - and beyond.

Dallas, Curt and our intern Tom Grimes (from Purdue) along with the other members of the Texas/WG/Function team have been cranking the Allen wrenches, and building parts left and right. And the software is becoming more of a reality with feedback from our growing test customer base.

Why are you writing about this?
Well - one of the things I am interested in - is hearing your thoughts on this new robot. Now, to be clear, the concept is not new. Take a look at IvanAnywhere, a hilarious and functional system being used by a software engineer for SQL Anywhere in Canada. And you can see a low-cost, fully-operational system called the TiLR (pronounced Tyler) which is being tested and was in use by google's Lunar X Prize Team for remote collaboration amongst groups. And another player in San Jose with HeadThere has been showing their product for some time. And another team in North Carolina called SuperDroid has developed a similar-looking telepresence robot called the RP2W (okay, sounds almost like watching Star Wars, yeah?).

But my question to you is: what do you think? Why do you think this technology has not made it in the marketplace today? I mean, most of these solutions are almost two years old - and I assume that the concept of a movable video system/screen is not new and revolutionary. Why hasn't this concept taken off beforehand?

And with the scores of videoconferencing companies out there - why hasn't videoconferencing evolved further than a separate room or a webcam with grainy pictures?

Any thoughts? Any insights? All are welcome. And, if you yourself know someone who is interested in the project - please send them to me as well. It is sanford AT willow garage dot - well, you know.

Texas Alpha Robot - Report #1

So - the last couple of weeks have been an insane whirlwind - Winter Holidays coming and with them, the crush of customers to my eCommerce site knockknock.biz. With programming issues from a long-departed former development team, my guys spent a tremendous amount of time and effort resolving issues and building the tools that have quashed most, if not all of the bugs we found with our code launch in the past few months.

But, in the past four weeks, I have been traveling back to my old haunts in Palo Alto, on a completely different, yet eerily familiar space. And, after a stopover with the family on Thanksgiving, I find myself knee-deep into robotics once again. But before this takes a strange turn, let me start from the beginning of this chapter.

"Sanford, check this out!"
About a month ago, I got a call from a friend of mine who was looking for some help in developing a new robotic product. He had showed it to me weeks earlier, and I was having way too much fun with it (see me instantiated in it on the first version).

Texas, as it is known in the office, is not a new idea - a teleoperated, telepresence robot that allows a person who is equipped with nothing but a webcam, a computer and a decent connection to the Internet (sippy straw ISPs need not play).

The two engineers behind Texas are Dallas Goecker and Curt Meyers, both engineers from Purdue University (my alma mater!) and both are insane enthusiasts of BattleBots. They happen to work at Willow Garage in Menlo Park, a research group working on "open-source robotics". Their mission, which might sound a little idealistic
to some, is to create the platform for Personal Robotics (PRs - like PCs. Get it?)

A better way of understanding the concept is to think of the analogies between the two spaces (computing and robotics). Here is the dictionary of the breakdown:

• PR2 (the robotic platform that is being built by WG) is analogous to the Macintosh
• ROS (the robotic operating system) is analogous to the PC-DOS or DOS (disk operating system)
• Texas (the simplified platform) is analogous to the Apple I demonstrated at the Homebrew Club by Woz and Jobs (but with less risk in the parts)

Make sense?

Better yet, watch the video below for a better understanding.

So, what does this mean? Well, I am back to my old haunt of being a product manager, focusing on delivery of a working system for customers and evolving the system for the near future. We are a small team, but working incredibly hard on this system for the next number of months - and I will have further notes as the system evolves over time.

"How can I help?"
So, you might be thinking - "Wow! That's cool! How can I get one?" Well, not sure yet - but I would love to hear if you have any great ideas on how to use the Texas in situations that it would be beneficial. The company is always willing to learn (it is a research lab) and I am always here to make it into something.

Catch up with me and tell me whatcha think.