2011: Year of the robot self

This could be the year when we quit dragging ourselves to work and send remote-controlled robot avatars instead

Why drag yourself to work through rush-hour traffic when you can stay at home and send a remote-controlled robot instead?

Firms in the US and Japan are already selling robot avatars that allow office workers to be in two places at once. So 2011 could be the year when many of us find ourselves sitting across the desk from an electronic colleague.

Californian company Willow Garage is developing a so-called telepresence robot called Texai, while Anybots, also in California, recently launched the QB office bot.

The QB, which looks like a small Segway vehicle with a robot head on top, can travel at 6 kilometres per hour, using a laser scanner to avoid books and other office clutter.

It can be controlled via a web browser from anywhere in the world and has camera eyes to allow you to navigate your robot's surroundings and see who you are talking to. A small LCD screen on the head means your colleagues can see you too.

You could argue that if you were planning to talk to people in other offices you could just use a videoconferencing system rather than a $15,000 robot. But logging into a robot bodyMovie Camera allows people to move around in a relatively normal way, says Trevor Blackwell of Anybots.

"If you have a bunch of people who are all used to talking to each other wherever they want to, it is a bit of an imposition to say, 'OK, from now on all conversations have to be in the videoconferencing room'."

Talking to a robot colleague might feel strange at first, but people seem to get used to it quite quickly. "Someone recently came to the office asking for me, and a colleague told them they had just seen me," says Blackwell. "But actually it was the robot they had seen. I was still at home."