The telerobotic bosses

An interesting article on the various uses of telerobots highlights, as might be expected, that the main hurdles involved are the human factors rather than technological ones. For mobile telepresence the technology required such as high speed wireless networks, cameras and small computers has been easily available at consumer price levels for at least the last few years.

The article suggests that a telerobot is viewed by its users as more than just a webcam on wheels, and that people soon associate the robot with the corporeal presence of the teleoperator rather than merely a piece of machinery.

In an office where a telerobot is operated by a single user it takes about 4 days before coworkers start to refer to the robot by the operator’s name. It’s not, “where’s the robot?” it’s “where’s Jeff?”

In previous work I have also come across the difficulties of deploying applications containing cameras into "secure" environments, so it's not too surprising that similar red tape also applies to telerobots. In some 2D barcode verification software which I wrote a couple of years ago I added a "paranoid mode" which permitted the system to visually verify markings without displaying any images or video on a screen at military sites. So banks and military facilities are probably not a good types of industry for early adoption of roaming video cameras, although once this becomes a more normal practice in the wider society I expect that attitudes and red tape will change out of necessity.

Another observation isn't what I'd expect.

About 30% of operating time is spent driving the robot around. Nearly 100% of users, however, didn’t want this time to be reduced. Driving around time was great for walking conversations, thinking, etc.

This might be the case if you're exploring a new remote site, or only visiting it via the telerobot quite infrequently. If you're teleoperating the robot on a more regular basis though at the same location I think the initial novelty is going to wear thin and that operators will want to keep the driving time to a minimum. This intuition comes partly from driving telerobots myself, such as the Surveyor SRV and GROK 1, and also from articles describing military use of Pacbots where there seems to be a demand for greater autonomy and reduced manual driving time. A compromise similar to that used on the rovers on Mars might be a simple waypoint based driving system, where the operator can designate a point on the floor that they wish to drive to and the moment-to-moment control of movement to the destination is then handled by the robot.

Also on the topic of human factors there's the issue of migration. Is a telerobotic worker "migrating" in some sense if the robot is located in another country? For pure telepresence this isn't an issue, but if the robot is going to be used to carry out something resembling a job, such as a doctor performing surgery, then red tape is definitely going to get involved. Many countries have quotas for migrant workers, and especially in hard times migrants generally become a focus of suspicion and hatred. Governments may view telerobotic working as a way for compaines to evade paying local employment taxes such as National Insurance.

I'll be very surprised if telerobotics doesn't become a growth area within the next five years, because all of the technology is here and there are social, environmental and economic forces pushing in this direction. No doubt the Great Recession has been holding things back, but that won't remain the case indefinitely. A decade from now I think it's entirely possible that telerobots could be so ubiquitous as to be thought of as unremarkable - like office chairs or domestic electrical appliances - and its quite foreseeable that teleoperation interfaces could become an integral part of social networking systems ("click here to visit me", etc).