Telepresence Robotics Acquisition

We looked at Telepresence for remote meeting presence or interaction with plant systems that benefited from remote control movement, voice interactions, image capture and control.   Not necessarily automated operation. At the time the capabilities were inadequate.

Today, Blue Ocean Robotics, a Danish robotics company, is announcing the acquisition of Suitable Technologies’ Beam telepresence robot business. Blue Ocean has been a Beam partner for five years, but now they’re taking things over completely.

The Beam robot began its life as an internal project within Willow Garage. It was spun out in 2012 as Suitable Technologies, which produced a couple different versions of the Beam. As telepresence platforms go, Beam is on the powerful and expensive side, designed primarily for commercial and enterprise customers. 

The most recent news from Suitable was the introduction of the BeamPro 2, which was announced over a year ago at CES 2018. The Suitable Tech website still lists it as “coming soon,” and our guess is that it’s now up to Blue Ocean to decide whether to go forward with this new version. Blue Ocean calls itself a “robot venture factory.” I’m not entirely sure what a “robot venture factory” is but Blue Ocean describes itself thusly:  .... "