Congratulations, Your Robot Just Accepted Your Friend Request

Google Tech Talk July 16, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Illah Nourbakhsh, CMU Robotics Institute, and Rich LeGrand, Charmed Labs. Telepresence is a straighforward application of robot technology--a robot becomes your eyes, ears, and possibly arms and legs which allows you to become "telepresent" in a remote location. But telepresence is only one example of how you might want to interact with a robot over the web. We propose using social networks to interact with robots and physical devices so they can become part of your custom information network. We plan on using Google technologies such as Gtalk and Android to form the basis of the network. And we plan on making middle school, high school and college kids the first users. We will bring prototype robot controller to the talk, and the most enthusiastic attendees will receive one if they wish to start hacking right away.