Anybots’ QA Gets Slimmer, Cheaper, Now Called QB
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Tuesday, 17 of November , 2009 at 12:17 am
At CES last year, BotJunkie was among the first to introduce you to Anybots’ QA telepresence robot. We were a little bit skeptical, though, about how much of a market there was for a $30,000 robot that performs a similar function to some guy walking around holding a netbook running Skype, especially in this economy.
At the 2009 IEEE conference on Technologies for Practical Robot Applications (TePRA) conference, Anybots demonstrated their latest telepresence robot, QB, which looks like a simplified version of QA… A simplified version with an eating disorder, since it doesn’t have that slick body on it anymore. Among other things, it also doesn’t have the ability to bend at the waist, it doesn’t have a big screen for displaying ties, and it doesn’t have that friendly looking head with glowy eyes. The most important thing that QB is missing as compared to QA is the pricetag of $30k; QB is estimated to cost only $10,000 – $15,000. That’s a lot cheaper, to be sure, but is it going to be cheap enough for commercial viability? According to Anybots, here’s the key difference between a telepresence robot and Skype:
“You can communicate with people while they are in their element, such as an office, manufacturing floor, or home,” Rapacki explained. “It’s easier to drop in on people this way or inspect parts in a manufacturing plant.”
Granted, this is an ability that’s unique to a mobile telepresence platform, but I still have to question whether or not it’s commercially viable. As I said last year after meeting QA, I really really hope that I’m wrong, that there’s a huuuuuge market for robots like this, and that Anybots will go on to produce a robot that will do my dishes. Sort of.
[ Anybots ] VIA [ Technology Review ]
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