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http://www.statesman.com/business/technology/new-robots-finding-homes-in-offices-other-workplaces-900431.html
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The declining prices for telepresence robots will encourage experimentation among companies and entrepreneurs, who will find new uses for them, analysts say."These robots will have a network effect," said Hyoun Park, an analyst with the Aberdeen Group, a technology research firm. "The more robots there are, the easier it will be to work remotely in ways we haven't thought about before."QB and similar robots could eventually be used to let consumers preview houses or hotels from afar, to allow people with disabilities to virtually visit tourist destinations, or to help fashion experts, from the comfort of their homes, give sartorial consultations to customers at clothing stores across the country.QB is already undergoing testing by NASA and Wolfram Research founder Stephen Wolfram.
For now, Anybots is pitching the QB to companies with remote workers. Currently, executives of those companies often meet with remote workers via video or teleconferences, or by having them flying into the main office.Blackwell says QB is a better solution because managers don't have to coordinate schedules to ensure everyone is in the same place at the same time. Also, it allows users to wander around and have the more informal conversations they might have if they were actually in the office.
http://www.statesman.com/business/technology/new-robots-finding-homes-in-offices-other-workplaces-900431.html?page=2
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[For]改為[In] the near term, at least, the range of applications for QB and similar rivals will be limited by their lack of arms to manipulate things in their environments. Arms are a challenge because they make the robots more expensive, more difficult to use and less stable, analysts say.
QB has some other shortcomings as well. Users can't tilt its head up or down, so it can be difficult to see something that's not at the robot's eye level. Its "neck" can be raised or lowered to a different height, but that can't be done remotely by the operator. And QB has only one eye-level camera and can't move its head side to side, so its peripheral vision is narrow.
Those limitations haven't dimmed the excitement of tester Wolfram, who created the scientific computer program Mathematica and whose company launched the WolframAlpha search engine last year.Slated to give a talk near his company's headquarters in Illinois at an event offering a 50-year retrospective on computing, Wolfram had a QB stand in for him.
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