Robots fill new roles at work

When Christian Johnson began his summer 2012 internship at the information management branch of NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, he little suspected that he'd soon be virtually tooling around the center via a vaguely humanoid robot on wheels. Once classes began in the fall, the 18-year-old had to finish up his senior year of high school in Buffalo, New York and needed to telecommute to continue his work as data analytics specialist at the research center. One of his co-workers had heard about a company called VGo Communications that makes a wheeled personal avatar, or what it calls a "productivity improvement solution," that lets people see and hear--and be seen and be heard--from far away. The co-worker wrote a proposal urging Langley's CIO to buy a VGo unit, and the CIO's office approved the purchase of one of the robotic avatars so that Johnson could use it to move virtually through the building and attend meetings--just one of the new ways robots are making their mark in business today. Industrial robots have been around since the early 1960s and have been used mainly in automotive plants.