By David Ponce
Traveling can suck. It’s much more gratifying to sit in your leather throne in your corporate office and order your minions from a distance. Enter QA, from AnyBots, a $30,000 telepresence self-balancing robot that can take you (virtually) to your Singapore child labor camp precocious workforce facility and see how things are going without ever having to leave the comfort of wherever you call home. Once powered up, you log into QA and move it around at will. You face shows up in its chest, your voice is heard through its speakers and more importantly the look of abject subordination is seen (and transmitted back to you, live) on the face of your cowering middle-managers through its soulless camera-eyes. You can make it bend and look around, and even has a laser that you can use to point to things that need to be done.
QA has a battery life of 4 to 6 hours, depending on usage and can move around at speeds of up to 6mph. Currently the company is small and is looking for investors, or any sort of financial help that would allow it to streamline their manufacturing process and drop that kick-in-the-gut $30k price tag.
[ AnyBots ]
As robots become common in public, existing privacy laws will restrict the ability of the machines to make audio recordings of human conversations (and possibly other recordings about personally identifiable humans). The law of robots will be challenging. Robot designers may react by making the machines record lots of other (non-audio) stuff about each machine's encounter with humans. The records will no doubt include detection of chemicals and odors associated with individual humans. –Ben http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2008/03/robot…
As robots become common in public, existing privacy laws will restrict the ability of the machines to make audio recordings of human conversations (and possibly other recordings about personally identifiable humans). The law of robots will be challenging. Robot designers may react by making the machines record lots of other (non-audio) stuff about each machine's encounter with humans. The records will no doubt include detection of chemicals and odors associated with individual humans. –Ben http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2008/03/robot…