Using a telepresence robot can help companies be more productive and reduce travel expenses.
If you were truly in charge of managing an office from afar, you might want to see more than whatever the employees set the webcam up in front of. Although there is still no replacement for actual face-to-face communication, these robots take telecommuting to a whole new level.
VGO’s Robots will allow you to move your webcam around a facility, seek out others to converse with and get the general lay of the land all from the comfort of your desktop, using basic WiFi technology which is already almost ubiquitous in the today’s business environment.
VGO a start-up in Nashua near Boston is in the process of developing a telepresence and video-conference robot which can be remote-controlled and attend conferences.
Not only can these robots help with remote management, but they can replace employees on snow days, help handicapped children attend school virtually and a host of other applications are available. Plans are already under way to develop the navigation system even further to anticipate obstacles that might otherwise be out of the webcam’s view.
"You can look somebody in the eye," says Rich Redelfs, a partner at the venture firm Foundation Capital, which uses a telepresence suite built by Cisco Systems (CSCO) to meet with companies in India, as reported by Business Week. "A lot of what we do in venture is we invest in people. You want to look somebody in the eye and say, ‘Do I trust this person enough to write them a multimillion-dollar check?’ We feel we can do that with telepresence."
Whether businesses will use these tools in any kind of large numbers remains to be seen. At a price $5,000, plus a mandatory support contract of $1,200 a year totaling $6,000, it’s a matter of time and budgets before Vgo is adopted more mainstream.
VGO has already raised $8 million and will introduce its robot at the start of June in Las Vegas at an exhibition.