Telecommuting has long been a dream. Imagine being able to work at home, far away from the office, and the rest of your colleagues. Technology has come a long way in making that a possibility, with instant messaging, web cams, and software that lets people collaborate on documents. But co-workers still miss all the great, casual opportunities for brainstorming, collaborating, and water cooler idea sessions. Not to mention the social isolation!
The folks at software company Sybase iAnywhere, in Waterloo, ON, thought of an ingenious solution when their colleague, Ivan Bowman, moved to Halifax. They built a robot version of Ivan! We visited the robot in Waterloo.
Get a sneak preview listen to the piece by clicking here. It’s very cool!
Have you ever worked at a distance from the rest of your colleagues? What were the pros and cons? Ever tempted to slack off? Let us know by leaving a comment.
Also, check out the photos of the robot at our flickr pool here
I was very interested to hear a preview of this piece. It’s the first time that I have heard what I sound like from the perspective of my co-workers in Waterloo. The quality is actually better than I had feared: although there are occasional pauses, I don’t sound like an artificial life form.
The IvanAnywhere experiment overall has progressed better than I had expected, and I am positively amazed that all of this can be put together from components off the shelf (along with the imagination and hard work of Ian McHardy). When the project began I must admit to some trepidation about how it would be received (object of ridicule? frustrating communication medium?), but my fears were fortunately groundless and I have been quite happy with the outcome.
I am interested in any suggestions on how to express my body language remotely. Adding a moveable hand or two would help with some things, but I think we need to work out a set of gestures that are understandable and clearly express the concept that I want to convey (a desire to say something, disagreement or agreement, or even boredom). Perhaps we could pre-program a set of interpretive dance moves!
When I first moved to Ottawa 15 months ago, I brought my job with me. I was the first in our team to work almost exclusively remotely. Our approach was somewhat more low-fi than what you’ve described.
My former boss took photos of me with two expressions, ‘Happy Chelsea’ and ‘Angry Chelsea’. When we had team meetings they set my photo on a chair so that they would remember I was on the line. It wound up being a bit of a joke, and I’m sure there was a lot they did with the photo that I wasn’t aware of, but it was somewhat effective.
The most difficult thing was trying to get air time with people outside of regular meetings. Unfortunately email and voicemail are easy for people to ignore and I didn’t have the advantage of ‘bumping’ in to people in the elevator at the office. Everything else about working from home was great, but that was a bit of a drag. Wouldn’t it be great if you could somehow virtually plant yourself at someone’s office doorstep until they came back like you can in real life?
I think the idea of a picture on a chair during a team meeting is a really neat idea. We have regular meetings with about 8 people. Usually everybody else is present in the meeting room except for one or two people on the speakerphone. It’s very easy to fade into the background if one isn’t right there in the room. I’ve been on the “other side” too, and it’s hard even to remember to say goodbye sometimes because it’s so easy to forget there’s someone else in the meeting.
Chelsea’s point about getting air time with people is one of the things I have come to enjoy with IvanAnywhere. We do use instant messaging at work, but not every body uses it. I found that I was talking less frequently to those on the team that didn’t use IM, and often only catching up with them when I traveled to the main office. Often I had a question where I was looking for input but I didn’t want to interrupt if they were concentrating. Now I can go park outside their office door. If it is shut (because they are away, talking to someone or just concentrating), I can leave the robot parked nearby while I continue to work at my desk in Halifax. When we are both available we can synchronize and talk without concentration-destroying interruptions.
I think that IM could be improved to better model our social signals. We do have presence indicators (away, be right back, busy, off-line), but for the software I use, those are all broadcast to everybody in my contacts list. I’d like to have different presence indicators for different groups (I’m “available” for co-workers while I’m at work, but “busy” to my friends, and vice-versa outside of work). I’d like to have gradations of busy (door shut: stay away; door partially ajar: trying to get something done, but interruptible for important things). Also, I’d like a way to know when someone was checking my status (“walking by my door”). In a physical office we notice when other people are checking to see if we are in and available to talk; we get back to them later if we have time and attention to spare.
On the other hand I imagine there is a fine balance between having a very rich IM experience on the one hand and having to spend too much effort maintaining presence indicators. Already I have trouble remembering to set my “on call/busy” indicators for IM. When I forget, I tend to get interrupted from many angles: the robot screen, IM, and the telephone can all go at once.
I’m glad to see that technology is making it easier to work remotely, although there is still a lot that can be improved. Interestingly, we’ve found some of these remote technologies such as IM are very useful even when everybody is relatively nearby, suggesting that remote-enabling technology can have wider benefits.
Great idea Ivan.
I just moved from Calgary to Halifax and am working remotely for a company back there… In fact the the day I heard your story on the CBC was my first day back at work so I was really interested to hear about your robot.
How do you handle doors or elevators or is this a non-issue for your robot?
Hi Douglas,
Doors are not a huge issue because the layout of our building is open. The people that I most often need to talk to are all on the third floor, and I can get to their office without going through doors. If their office door is closed, then I do need to wait or ask them to open it, but doors are usually open if people are available to talk.
On a few occasions we have moved the robot to another floor for a general meeting or for a social event in the cafeteria. Going through the doors is not difficult if somebody holds them open, but unfortunately the wireless signal drops in the elevator. In those cases, Ian has connected a joystick and driven the robot directly until it is back into wireless access.
There are doors to the meeting rooms that we use for team meetings, and usually it is no problem as the doors are open when the room is not in use, but on a couple of occasions I have asked someone to open the door.
Cool system, Ivan!
I worked as a software developer for a biomedical company in the LA area for 5-1/2 years before returning to Canada for various reasons 2 years ago. I now work remotely for the same company but really miss the ability to interact with colleagues the old way. To make matters worse, corporate policy recently blocked IM communications leading to an increased sense of isolation.
One of my colleagues and I have seen a couple of articles on your system and have concluded that an IvanAnywhere like telepresence would greatly improve our ability to interact. I was wondering whether you have published any information on the technical aspects or lessons learned for your robot that might guide others in putting together a similar system?
I used to work remotely (for 3 years). I agree with the above posters. Luckily, there were many of us who did at my company so it was ‘normal’ to be dialed in on telecon. I thought one of the hardest things was judging the body language of people in the room at group meetings, thus being able to frame comments in an appropriate fashion.
We used IM A LOT, it is how we kept in contact with each other, and I would also call people up, sometimes just ‘to chat’.
I love the robot though. That would be very effective! Hope I get the chance to work remotely again someday.
I also wanted to comment that I was certainly not a slacker, in fact, I think my actual time was much more effective than when in the office!
Cheers!
Laura
Kevin,
Thanks for your questions. Since May, when IvanAnywhere went live, we’ve been accumulating experiences and are learning what works well and what doesn’t. Ivan and I plan to speak about our experiences at an upcoming conference at the University of Waterloo, the “Workplace 2017″ conference (http://www.2017.uwaterloo.ca). Perhaps after that we’ll put something together in writing and publish it, possibly in the CSCW (Computer Supported Co-operative Work) literature, which has had numerous articles over the past decade on the issues and requirements of telepresence.
I’ve worked remotely too, and I found the biggest challenge was that everything had to be spelled out…you couldn’t just get the sense of the “vibe”, or whether someone just wanted to be left alone. I think Ivan Anywhere is great for that.
Kevin,
My colleague Ian McHardy did all of the work for making IvanAnywhere a success but unfortunately we’re not in a position right now to disclose the steps he took to make it happen.
There are a couple of commercial solutions that we have found since we started this project.
HeadThere and RoboDynamics are two firms that I have heard of. I don’t know much about either of these personally, but it is an indication that someday you could just pick a remote unit out of a catalog.
http://www.headthere.com/
http://www.robodynamics.com
There are also some solutions already available for telemedicine but when we started this project we could not find an available solution that met all of our requirements at an acceptable price.
If you are looking into a similar solution, I’d say that audio quality is probably the most important factor for me. I want to be able to hear everybody speaking in a meeting, and I don’t want to have to ask them to speak up.
The battery life for IvanAnywhere is quite good (about 10h). If you had a solution to automatically recharge, you could get away with less, but I think 4h or so is a minimum given the length of some of our meetings and various activities.
It would also be nice to have a high-quality digital camera to take pictures of white boards or powerpoint presentations. Usually powerpoint is no problem if I can get a copy before hand and there is enough resolution for me to follow along, but white boards are not convenient with our current setup. There is a capability to use the tablet on the robot as a white board, and that is something that I’m exploring, but it is a departure from our normal mode of just wandering over to a large board and marking it up with big ideas.
I just head the Spark repeat segment on CBC radio…
We use videoconferencing a lot, which is fine where everyone is in a meeting room except one or two people. Where the robot (teleoperated
device, strictly speaking) shines is
in informal interaction, as Ivan says. I wrote a concept for a humanoid version (“Norbert”) a few years back, and there was a wheeled
version running around at the SuperComputing 2001 conference.
Having some autonomous features, like a real robot, would help deal with loss of signal in the lift
and recharging when no-one’s around.
I run RoboDynamics which was mentioned above by Ivan and I just wanted to chime and say that there seems to be tremendous interest out there for robotic telepresence – and we are fully committed to building a business around this very concept. We have a robot named TiLR (Telepresence internet connected Low cost Robot) that is currently in Beta Testing. As everyone seems to be enthusiastic about robotic telepresence, don’t hesitate to contact me if you’re interested in evaluating TiLR.
Best,
/F