Telepresence Robot History: From Minsky to ABB Arms

A telepresence robot lets you be somewhere without travelling there. Usually it is a screen, a camera and a microphone on wheels or on a desk, driven over the internet by a person far away. Children too ill to go to school use them to join lessons, and since August 2026 a Japanese airline has used them to help passengers at regional airports from one central office. This post follows the idea from Marvin Minsky's 1980 essay and the first office robots to today's classroom robots, then looks at the next step, where the remote person also gets arms, and at where ABB robots come in.

A telepresence robot joining a dance class at VCUarts Depot in Richmond, Virginia, 2017. Photo: Tom Woodward / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

From hot cell manipulators to robots in the office

The word is older than the robots. In 1980 the MIT scientist Marvin Minsky published an article called "Telepresence" in Omni magazine, using a term credited to the futurist Patrick Gunkel. Minsky wrote that his first vision of a remote-controlled economy came from Robert A. Heinlein's story Waldo, in which a man works through mechanical hands. Minsky wanted machines good enough that an operator would see, hear and feel as if standing at the far end. In 1980 that was mostly a wish, because cameras, screens and networks were expensive and slow.

Marvin Minsky in 2012; his 1980 Omni essay made the word telepresence widely known. Photo: Joi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Remote handling already existed in nuclear labs. Behind thick shielding walls and lead glass windows, operators worked master-slave manipulators, mechanical arms that copied the movements of a handle on the safe side of the wall. Reactor centres such as Petten in the Netherlands used them to handle radioactive material, and hot cells still use them today. These arms gave the operator hands at a distance, but the operator stayed at the window and saw the work through glass. Minsky's kind of telepresence, where you could be in another place, needed cheap video and networks that arrived decades later.

Prince Bernhard is shown a remote manipulator at the Petten reactor centre, Netherlands, December 1964. Photo: Jack de Nijs / Anefo via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The first office telepresence robots came out of Silicon Valley. At Willow Garage, a robotics lab in Menlo Park, engineers built a prototype called Texai so that developers who could not be in the building could still move around it and join conversations. A spin-off, Suitable Technologies, turned Texai into the Beam, unveiled in September 2012 for offices and conference rooms at a price of 16,000 US dollars. Double Robotics, backed by the Y Combinator accelerator, began shipping its Double in May 2013. It used an iPad as the face, mounted on a pole above a two-wheeled base.

A Suitable Technologies Beam robot, the product that grew out of Willow Garage's Texai, 2013. Photo: Intel Free Press / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Telepresence robots in classrooms and airports

School is the most personal use. No Isolation, founded in Norway in 2015 by Karen Dolva, developed AV1 with children, teachers and the St Olav Hospital School for pupils with long-term illness. The small white robot sits on a classroom desk, and the child at home sees and hears the lesson through it with an app. No Isolation says more than 5,000 AV1 robots are in use in 18 European countries. In England more than 2,000 now sit on desks at about £3,500 each, and councils give them to pupils with anxiety or emotionally based school avoidance as well as to children who are ill.

An AV1 robot from No Isolation, which sits on a classroom desk for a child learning from home. Photo: Marius Vabo / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The reported results can be striking. In February 2026 Wakefield Council said its schools had 21 AV1 robots, and that one Year 3 pupil went from 3 percent attendance to 76 percent while another returned full time to mainstream school within three months. In September 2026 Tes covered new projects in Manchester and Bristol that include technology to help pupils back into lessons, while critics in the press argued that robots let anxious children avoid facing their fears. Airports use the same idea for work. On 21 August 2026 ANA and avatarin began serving passengers at Hiroshima Airport through newme robots operated from Kansai, with more airports added through October.

A telepresence robot with a tablet for a face moving through the crowd at the Cool Product Expo, 2013. Photo: Steve Jurvetson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

A screen on wheels can look and talk, but it cannot pick anything up. Adding arms is where industrial robots meet telepresence, and ABB researchers have worked on that. In a 2025 paper, ABB Corporate Research in Sweden and Aalto University in Finland described driving an ABB IRB 1200 and a GoFa 5 cobot through a Meta Quest 3 headset, with a depth camera on the robot showing the scene as a 3D point cloud. With the point cloud, task completion improved by 28 percent and critical errors in tight spaces fell by a third. In 2020 Zhejiang University researchers teleoperated a dual-arm YuMi with a motion capture suit to pick up a medicine bottle and help an elderly woman get a cup.

Using an AR headset to check a GoFa cell; ABB researchers have used a Meta Quest 3 headset to drive GoFa and IRB 1200 robots. Photo: ABB

Where telepresence robots with arms go next

The next telepresence robots will probably combine a mobile base, a screen and one or two arms, so a remote nurse, technician or relative can do small physical jobs as well as talk. ABB's mobile YuMi concept, a dual-arm robot on a wheeled base shown for hospital labs, points in that direction, though ABB has not presented it as a telepresence product. In factories, remote operation could let one expert clear a stuck part or teach a new task from another site. Our post on hospital delivery robots covers the mobile robots already working in hospitals.

ABB's mobile YuMi concept, a dual arm robot on a wheeled base, in a hospital lab corridor. Photo: ABB

Delay, safety and trust are the open problems. A video call can stutter without harm, but an arm that lags behind the operator's hand can hit something, so remote arms need local safety functions that slow or stop the robot by themselves, the job SafeMove does on ABB controllers. Schools have to settle questions about privacy and recording in class, and about when a robot helps a child come back and when it makes staying away easier. Cost still limits who gets one, and the people at both ends need practice before the robot feels natural.

Visitors greet a person on a Beam telepresence robot in an Apple Store, 2015. Photo: Errapi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

At home, a telepresence robot is still mostly a tablet that moves, used to check on older relatives or pets. Giving it arms raises the price and the safety bar. Cobots such as ABB's GoFa CRB 15000 show how an arm can work near people: it limits its force and speed, stops on contact and can be guided by hand. A remote-operated arm in a living room would need all of that plus a reliable connection, and nobody sells one for homes yet. Engineers who want to try remote control of an ABB arm can start safely in simulation and test the cell first in RobotStudio.

Moving an ABB GoFa arm by hand; the cobot limits force and stops on contact. Photo: ABB

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