>
How A Handful Of Billionaires Created The Transgender "Movement"
All Teslas in the US get a one month trial of FSD starting this week
Bill Banning Chemtrails Passes Tennessee Senate
Scientists Close To Controlling All Genetic Material On Earth
Doodle to reality: World's 1st nuclear fusion-powered electric propulsion drive
Phase-change concrete melts snow and ice without salt or shovels
You Won't Want To Miss THIS During The Total Solar Eclipse (3D Eclipse Timeline And Viewing Tips
China Room Temperature Superconductor Researcher Had Experiments to Refute Critics
5 video games we wanna smell, now that it's kinda possible with GameScent
Unpowered cargo gliders on tow ropes promise 65% cheaper air freight
Wyoming A Finalist For Factory To Build Portable Micro-Nuclear Plants
High-Speed Railway Progresses Towards 200-mph Dallas-Houston Line
27 Ft-tall 3D-printed Structure Built by New Robot | ICON's Multi-Story Robotic Construction Sys
Now they're getting a bit more hands-on thanks to Japanese company Telexistence, which has begun trials in convenience stores of a robot shelf-stacker that can be controlled by a human via VR.
The Model T (yes, it's named after the classic Ford car) looks like the most mundane Gundam ever. It's basically a robot torso mounted to a waist-high platform, restocking shelves in a store with its two articulating arms and complex hands.
But it doesn't need to be particularly artificially intelligent to do this. The Model T is directly controlled by a human using a stock-standard VR setup from anywhere in the world that has an internet connection.
The robot's joints have 22 degrees of freedom, giving it a pretty wide range of movement without requiring much more space than a human would need. Telexistence also says the video connection between the robot and the human operator has a latency of 50 milliseconds, so it should be smooth-controlling.
That said, in the video it does look like pretty slow going, with the robot timidly restocking bottles of drinks at a pace that would get a regular human worker called to the manager's office. Still, maybe the human operator was unfamiliar with the tech and was just being a bit overly cautious.
It's a little hard to see what advantages the robot has over a human employee, but Telexistence says that it could allow staff to work from home – crucial in our current age of social distancing – and recruit workers from basically anywhere.