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Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Telepresence Robotics with Autonomy

Been a while since I  have seen novel telepresence robotics.   Here is an Ava Robotic telepresence system with autonomous navigation.  We experimented with meeting attentendance telepresence.

Ava Robotics Introduces Autonomous Telepresence Robot
Founded by ex-iRobot engineers, this startup is building a remote presence robot powered by sophisticated sensors and autonomous navigation   By Evan Ackerman in IEEE Robotics

Seven years ago, iRobot introduced us to Ava, a sort of tech demonstrator designed to show how robots were capable of doing things like—well, the company wasn’t entirely sure, but telepresence was one of the ideas. The robot’s autonomous navigation was certainly impressive, and Ava could avoid moving obstacles at the speed of a brisk walk, which wasn’t something we’d seen a lot of back in 2011.

In 2012, iRobot announced RP-VITA, a medical telepresence robot based on the Ava platform. And in 2013, iRobot and Cisco collaborated on the Ava 500, a commercial telepresence system with integrated autonomous navigation. We haven’t heard too much about it since then, but today a startup called Ava Robotics is coming out of stealth mode to announce its plans to bring the technology behind Ava to market.

Ava Robotics, based in Cambridge, Mass., was founded by former employees of iRobot, which holds a minority position in the startup. Ava has licensed some key remote presence technology from iRobot and wants to (re?)launch the Ava platform as a “new video collaboration solution that offers users ‘practical teleportation’ with the ability to transform remote work and site visits.” A telepresence robot, in other words.   ... " 

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