Yesterday, at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show, iRobot presented its latest prototype—a mobile robot that uses a tablet computer for its brain.

There have been plenty of other telepresence robots, ranging from video screens on wheels to strange, blob-like prototypes. The new robot, called AVA (for avatar), is an interesting twist, combining telepresence with autonomous control. A user can either operate Ava remotely, for a video conference perhaps, or let the robot maneuver around on its own, carrying out tasks assigned to it through the tablet acting as its head.

AVA is equipped with microphones, speakers, and a host of sensors, including two PrimeSense motion sensors (the same ones used in the Xbox Kinect), as well as sonar and laser rangefinders for mapping. It builds a map of its surroundings and displays it on the iPad. A user can touch a spot on the map to tell the robot where to go.

AVA could open up robotic programming to a host of people, potentially leading to interesting new applications.

PC Mag's Lance Ulanoff writes:

Angle explained that the inclusion of these mobile devices means that anyone who can program an iPad or Android app can now program a robot. Some more obvious uses include meeting telepresence, home and office security, material handling and grabbing you a beer from your refrigerator and bringing it back to you.

To see the robot in action, check out PCMag's video interview below.

Colin Angle, CEO of iRobot, gave a keynote talk last month at the 2010 Connected Health Symposium in Boston. He didn't say what the company is working on in its new healthcare robots business unit, but he predicted robots will have a crucial role to play in the future of healthcare. Angle said that assistive robots will enable old or sick people to live independently for longer.

"The cost path we are on in healthcare is not sustainable," Angle said during his speech. He pointed to figures showing that the elderly often have chronic health issues that require expensive assisted living programs or nursing homes. "The numbers of seniors are going up and our ability to care for them is going down," said Angle.

Even without a chronic illness, common tasks, such as cleaning the house become more difficult for the elderly. And informal care giving by relatives can take a lot of time, and put stress on a family. "Growing old is a physical problem and needs a physical solution," Angle said. "We need a robot to go out and do physical stuff for us in order to live independently and not end up in a nursing home."

The challenges of developing such a robot are substantial. It would encounter a variety of unexpected and unpredictable situations, so it would need to be flexible and adaptable—able to move around in a messy room, pick up unfamiliar objects, or open doors. Some research robots have demonstrated a few such skills, but there is nothing that can do them all.

A home-help robot could also deliver remote medical care, Angle noted. A robot equipped with a blood pressure detector, stethoscope, a camera, and other low-cost equipment could allow doctors to perform routine check-ups remotely.

I would guess that iRobot plans to release a telepresence robot that can perform some of these functions in the next few years. Several other companies have recently launched telepresence robots—essentially video-conferencing systems on wheels—and iRobot's now cancelled ConnectR project was an early effort in this area.

Bill Townsend, CEO of Barrett Technology, which makes robotic hands and arms, listened to Angle's talk. He predicts that, within 20 to 30 years, home-help robots will be a part of everyday life. "If anyone can do it, it would be iRobot," Townsend said.

A team of roboticists have taken a radically new approach to designing robotic hands by creating a versatile gripper out of a beanbag. The group showed that the simple yet effective approach let the robotic hand pick up a range of objects and even pour a glass of water.

Grasping is a challenge in robots because highly articulated fingers that imitate humans' take a lot of power to control and are delicate, expensive, and not always good at picking up objects they haven't encountered before. But effective robotic hands could have a host of applications, such as in military situations (like disabling bombs), homes, hospitals, and manufacturing settings.

The team--made up of scientists from the University of Chicago, Cornell University and iRobot--filled a stretchy, balloon-like bag with coffee grounds. The coffee grounds, like any granular material (sugar, salt, glass beads) have the property of flowing easily when the grains are loose and have room to move, and solidifying into a mass when space constricts and the grains can no longer pass each other. The squishy ball is attached to a vacuum pump to change how much space the grains have.

To work, a robotic arm attached to the beanbag gently presses the ball onto whatever object it wants to grasp. The bag has enough air so that the grains gently contour around the object. When it's ready grip an object, a vacuum connected to the arm sucks a small amount of air out of the bag, tightening the grains around the object enough to have a firm enough grasp to pick it up.

This work looks like an extension of the Chembot that iRobot demoed last October, a robot which also used jamming methods to deflate and inflate. The idea in this case was to create a robot that could squeeze under a door or through a hole before regaining its shape for surveillance missions. This particular DARPA-funded work was detailed in a recent PNAS paper.

The video below shows the hand in action. Halfway into the video, the hand picks up and pours a glass of water, and even picks up a pen and writes. However, there might be certain objects that it would have difficulty grasping (for example, something soft).