The Indiegogo project hopes to offer a relatively affordable and simple telepresence solution for existing tablet users. The Kubi itself is essentially a tablet mount that can do a 300-degree pan plus 90-degree tilt, and the prototypes we saw featured two spring-loaded aluminium arms that elegantly pinches the tablet — we’ve been told that they can even fit Microsoft’s Surface in landscape. The robot is pretty much platform-agnostic as long as the tablet supports Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy, which is how the robot receives its motion commands. Dont forget to look at the video.
Here is the video
The demo we saw featured iPads that had a KUBI app running in the background to take care of the Bluetooth communication. Obviously it doesn’t matter what teleconference app we use alongside, but we did use FaceTime between two iPads in the same hotel suite for the sake of convenience. To control the robot on the other end (to, say, look around a room, interact with a baby or stalk a subject), a secondary device is needed to access a web page with a matrix of buttons, which correspond to different coordinates within the robot’s range of motion.
They said that they didnt want Kubi to be mobile because motors are expensive and the batteries used to power an upright robot would be prohibitively costly. In short, it was far simpler to create a cool telepresence system than a sub-par roaming robot.
Kubi is expected to hit the market by summer and will be priced $249, but early you can pre-order for $199 on Indiegogo and receive the shipment on end of April.
