phil osborn wrote:
> >Emlyn O'Regan wrote:
> > > For instance, I'd love to be able to rent a robot body for the day from
> >a US
> > > robot-rental dealer (robo-hurtz), and be able to turn up to my US
> >clients
> > > and actually interact with them, whilst tucked in my little hidey-hole
> >in
> > > Melbourne. I'd pay money for that.
> > >
> Why waste all that money? You could hire a real, live human being to carry
> around an RF linked webcam - or two, for binocular vision - and microphones.
> With a fairly simple switching system, you could give them instructions,
> or even incorporate a joystick, mouse, or touchpad controller that would use
> various input modalities - buzzers, tones, or actual vocal interpretations -
> to instruct them how to move, what to look towards, etc.
>
> Your voice would either be a speaker mounted as close to the person's mouth
> as possible - probably low neck area, or their voice as an interpreter, with
> you hearing and/or reading auto-translation via voice recognition and
> translation software. A further check on accuracy could be provided via a
> heads-up display for your telepersona operator, who would see the original
> voice signal looping back as a retranslation into their own language.
Oh, let's see...
* Confidentiality (Can the puppet be trusted, to at least the same
degree that you can be trusted, not to breach any secret info? If
not, forget about the puppet being allowed to interact with anything
remotely sensitive - like, say, the specs for your company's
not-yet-released project that you're working on.)
* Accuracy (Say, if the server's down and you need to get it working
again - or anything where you need to physically access a machine,
whether due to security, errors, or whatnot - it's much slower to say
"click X" and have it clicked than to just click it yourself. Plus,
if the "reformat company's financial database" gets accidentally
clicked - and errors are more likely here - are you to blame, or the
puppet?)
* Reliability (Robots don't take sick days. When one of them goes down
for maintenance, you can just use another. They're interchangable,
and you don't have to pay robots to keep them as spares, at least not
after buying the robots up front.)
* Interaction (If you get frustrated and curse a robot, it won't walk
out in the middle of a job. Plus, the tele-operation style proposed
here is also known as 'micro-managing', which has been shown to have
negative results as opposed to letting someone do a job they know how
to do, though this does not apply for a robot that does not know how
to do anything.)
I could probably think of more if I tried.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 17:36:56 MDT