Most of what you see is the picture coming from the main camera on top of the robot. You drive Double through the web interface, and it works pretty well. I logged into the robot through a slick web interface on Google Chrome, and: In our case, Double supplied us with an iPad Air 2 that included LTE, so we didn’t have to worry about that. It’s important to understand that for Double to work, you have to have your own iPad, which acts as the screen, functions as at least part of the brain, and provides wireless connectivity. This includes attaching an iPad to the Double robot itself. He said it was mostly just attaching things to places where they were obviously supposed to be attached. That means I have not personally touched, or even seen, the robot I’m going to spend this article talking about, but here’s a picture showing what it looks like.įor the setup process, I enlisted my brother, who took care of the whole thing in about 5 minutes. I asked Double to send a review unit to my family in Portland, Ore., approximately 4,300 kilometers away. I live in Bethesda, Md., just outside of Washington, D.C. Reviewing a telepresence robot is a bit different than most of the reviews that we do, because the whole point of this robot is that it spends as much time as possible very far away from you. The robot requires an iPad Air 2 or iPad Pro (not included), and comes with a 720p HD camera, audio kit, and charging dock. And with that metaphor for you to puzzle out, let’s get to it. So as you read about how this went, keep in mind that I’m doing the equivalent of trying to chop up a potato with a spatula. They were probably confident that the robot, even if it couldn’t provide an ideal experience, would still perform reasonably well. I let Double (the company) know all of this beforehand, and they placed absolutely no restrictions on what I could try. Double is not really engineered or intended to do what I’m going to ask it to do, and from that perspective, this review will be rather punishing for the poor robot. I’ll be using it extensively on weak LTE when it’s meant for strong Wi-Fi. So it’s important to read this review in context: I’ll be trying to use this robot outside when it’s meant for indoor use. Personally, I’m less interested in business use cases, and for this review I wanted to know what this robot can do for me in different non-structured environments (aka the real world). If you want to use a Double for business, then great, go right ahead. And it’s not unique in these requirements: it’s where all telepresence robots do best. We’re not going to deliberately run it into stuff, or drive down stairs, or take it swimming, or anything like that. Our goal is to see what the robot is capable of while knowingly operating it outside of the environments and infrastructure that it’s intended to be most effective in. The Double 2 is designed to operate indoors, in offices and workspaces and classrooms where you have strong and reliable Wi-Fi. To be clear, we aren’t trying to intentionally abuse the Double 2. Where are we taking it? Not some business or education environment. Cool, now we can see what this robot can do-and maybe what it can’t. To their credit, the company didn’t even hesitate, and they shipped us a brand new Double 2, along with the camera and audio kit accessories and charging dock. it had to come with an LTE cellular data connection, allowing us to use the robot free of Wi-Fi and 2. When Double Robotics asked us if we wanted to test out a Double 2, we said sure, with two conditions: 1. We’ve tested these things out before, and once you get past some hiccups and quirks, they generally do what they’re supposed to do, which is provide you with a mobile embodied presence somewhere that you’re not. It looked cool, but we didn’t get super excited about it, because like most telepresence robots, it’s designed to work very well in some very specific, usually business or education-focused environments. At CES in January, Double Robotics announced the Double 2, a major upgrade to their super skinny telepresence platform that features better stability and turbo speed.
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