>From: Adrian Tymes <wingcat@pacbell.net>
>Subject: Re: Teleoperation [was Re: TV: Documentary Science of Beauty]
>Date: Sat, 02 Sep 2000 09:55:39 -0700
>
>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...
>* 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.
On the plus side, the human can recognize nuances and details and make
inferences that can add significantly to the experience. The security
concerns that you mention would certainly have to be taken into account. I
was thinking more about someone who would like to attend three different
conferences in 3 different cities at the same time, or who simply couldn't
make time to travel, but would still like to snoop around and check out the
competition first hand. The whole experience would be recorded, no doubt,
and several different teleoperators could tap in or take over direction. In
addition, the humbot could be given general instructions and a heads-up
display list of priorities to check out - boothes to visit, products to get
a close look at, people to watch for, so that the teleoperators could take a
break or switch to other humbots at other locations.
On the security side, a company of the size of say Sony, which is already
doing a lot of R & D in this general area, could train its own people and
use them to get expert coverage of a subject.
I think that it would be fun to organize a party teleop during the Brazilian
samba contests. A group - or a website! - oops now I've gone and killed a
potential patent... Darn, gosh, o'well, could set up a teleop with
good bandwidth and do a pay-for-view, pay-more-for-control remote party.
The applications for X-sites are obvious, although they get pretty good
dedicated site coverage already, I'm sure.
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at
http://profiles.msn.com.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 17:36:58 MDT