The days of extended independent living, where a robot could allow you to have a quasi-physical presence with a distant relative, talk to them, perform chores for them and possibly even have physical contact with them, is around the corner. At the Internet of Things (IoT) World Forum last week in Chicago, I caught a glimpse of the future and it isn’t far off.
Even though conference sponsor Cisco admits that the IoT is overhyped, the progress is real and the effect on industries and society will be profound. Goldman Sachs is predicting by 2020 there will be 28 billion connected devices. 300,000 devices per hour are being connected to the Internet according to Wim Elfrink, Cisco’s Executive Vice President of the Industry Solutions Group and Chief Globalization Officer—he’s the visionary for IoT. According to Elfrink the IoT is being adopted faster than any technology in history. Essentially what he and everyone else is saying is that in the future, anything that can be connected to the Internet will be.
The sense I got from walking around the conference was that only a tiny sliver of the IoT market consists of the sexy and buzzworthy devices like the Nest Thermostat or the gadgets from SmartThings (just acquired by Samsung). Most of what I saw are really hairy and exceptionally complex networking and data analysis tools. Very geeky stuff.
I spent some time talking to Youssef Saleh, Sr. Vice President and General Manager of the Remote Presence Business Unit for iRobot Corporation.
Video conferencing systems are static, and they require someone on the receiving end to do something to complete the connection…whether that’s entering a passcode, logging on to a website, or whatever. The Ava 500 does what you’d expect it to do. If you’re an executive in New York and you want to participate in a meeting in San Jose, the Ava 500, like other telepresence robots on the market, let’s you have a presence in the meeting, see and listen to what is going on and contribute.
Other telepresence robots let the remote user control the whereabouts of the robot, but he/she needs to navigate. With the Ava 500, the robot learns the environment it is in. So a remote user could initiate a connection to the robot and then instruct it, through a mobile app, to go to the Board Room and off it would go. It would get there itself and it would do so in a safe manner (the Roomba part). And it doesn’t need to be connected to the network while it navigates.
The Ava 500 looks like a piece of office equipment. It isn’t as anthropomorphic as one would expect, but I’m sure in a product generation or two it will acquire a persona that engenders more warmth. Whereas most robots can be controlled remotely, the unique characteristic of the Ava 500 is that it knows its own environment and can wander about just by telling it where you want it to go.
When Youssef and I were together in the basement of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Chicago, he was able to virtually knock on the door of his colleague at iRobot headquarters in Bedford, Massachusetts. What impressed me about the system was that Youssef didn't need to know where the robot was in their complex in Massachusetts. He just instructed it from Chicago to go Joe’s office and off it went. The system, like with Uber, knows where the robots are and automatically sends the one that’s available and closest.
I quickly imagined that after he got done talking to Joe in Bedford, he could have done the same thing with a colleague in Sydney. With only the slightest exaggeration, he could really be in two places at one time.
A day later, curiously, at the Chicago Venture Summit, Travis Kalanick, the CEO and co-founder of Uber gave the luncheon keynote talk. He got a chuckle out of the audience when he said, “If I press this button, I can make a car move in Beijing.” iRobot is doing the same thing in a more intimate way.
And just as Uber has to know where cars are when you request one, the iRobot system has the same intelligence within a building or campus.
My imagination quickly saw the day when the Hyatt Regency Chicago, one of the largest hotels in the U.S., would have a bevy of Ava 500s available for its clients, much like it has AV equipment and computers. If someone wanted to “attend” the next IoT World Forum, they could do so by renting an Ava 500 from the Hyatt—not by flying to Chicago and getting a room in the hotel. It wasn't lost on me that we were having this conversation in Chicago right at the same time as the Ebola crisis was hitting the United States and the stock market was swooning over fears about what an epidemic might do to the travel industry. Youssef, without feigning any glee over other people’s misfortune, clearly understood that this was a big opportunity for telepresence.
Says Saleh, “Enterprises are global, distributed. The Ava 500 allows you to be in multiple places at once.”
Because the iRobot can navigate its space without being connected to the Internet, the myriad ways in which this technology could be used to remotely monitor and communicate with elderly people at home jumped to the forefront of my imagination. Add to it a robot’s ability to perform a task—like dispense medicine, scratch someone’s back or sweep the floor, and a Jetson’s like future doesn't seem that far off.
Neil Kane (@neildkane) is the president of Illinois Partners which helps companies, universities and investors with innovation strategies and technology commercialization.
