iRobot Ava 500: World's First Self-Navigating Telepresence Robot Is Classic 'Sci-Fi' Bossy!

Massachusetts-based iRobot has announced recently its plan to sell a "telepresence" bot- Ava 500 - by early-2014. The robot shall beam a high-quality video feed from its user over a screen mounted over a fat 5'5" rolling column, and the user gets to see ever single task carried out by the robot through a webcam placed at the top of the screen.

Redefining "remote meeting", this robot employs an iPad app to schedule a meeting in a room of user's choice, and as the set time of the meet approaches, the app allots the caller to an Ava 500 unit and the robot plods its way through into the right room of the meeting, even if the user's unsure of the path. While it plods, the robot detects obstacles in the way- people, furniture, walls, machinery- and automatically dodges them. The user may even stop the robot midway in order to chat with people or other robots. It even has a complete 360-degree movement, implying that by making just slight changes in its positional adjustments, it can maintain 'eye-contact' with the attendees. Post-meeting, it will automatically head towards its charging station. This is simply an autonomous proxy for people who just can't be everywhere checking every thing all at once. How I'm glad that editors at CrazyEngineers don't have a similar bot yet at their disposal, else we authors would've had to cut short our Christmas.


This ain't the first robot to have mounted a screen over a rolling column, as earlier there have been bots that allowed workers and doctors to offer their assistance remotely, but other robots don't have the self-navigation and obstacle-detection awesomeness of Ava 500. Its telepresence technology (audio+video) comes from Cisco. iRobot and Cisco anticipate Ava 500's price to be somewhere around $70,000. Units may also be leased out to companies for $2,000 to $2,500 per month.

Watch this video for more on Ava 500-