My first morning in the Fast Company office was an awkward affair. Bleary-eyed, I managed to navigate out of my editor’s office, only to slam head-first into a glass door. I lurched down the hallway into the lobby area with the sound of giggling colleagues in the background.
At least it wasn’t my flesh-and-blood body banging around the New York office. Instead, I was perched on my sofa in San Francisco, using a computer to control the QB, a $15,000 “telepresence” robot that’s essentially a teleconferencing system on wheels. The QB, a hybrid of WALL-E and a Segway, can sit, stand, roll around on its wheels, speak, display video on its forehead, and point a laser out of one of its “eyes.”
Long tapped for factory work and perilous situations, robots now want into our offices. I signed on to test-drive the bot for a week in advance of the QB’s limited rollout this month by Anybots. The Silicon Valley startup will be entering a suddenly crowded white-collar-robot market: In the past year, fellow startups VGo and Willow Garage have also come out with bots. (Google cofounder Sergey Brin was recently spotted using Willow Garage’s Texai robot.)
Proponents argue that such robots are the natural outgrowth of pervasive connectivity, inexpensive broadband, and the realization that constant business travel is taxing on both people and the planet. Dozens of remote employees could time-share one robot to slash travel and boost productivity. But most people had just one question when I rolled up on them in the hallway: What’s the point? Are workplace robots the next evolution of telepresence applications like Cisco’s desktop apparatus, or is this just another sci-fi fantasy in search of a meaningful application?
