The Robotic Workplace: MIT Moves Forward

At the MIT Sloan School of Management, technology helps remote workers remain involved in the day-to-day activities of the workplace when they are not on site. A forced move for the executive education team to an office away from Sloan’s main building due to construction, combined with an increase in workers’ interest in cutting down on commute times, prompted Peter Hirst, PhD, Executive Director of Executive Education at the Sloan School of Management, to explore avenues for allowing more worker flexibility without adversely impacting team productivity. Enter two robots, which are basically iPad stands on wheels made by Double Robotics.

Dr. Hirst purchased these robots about a year ago. Remote workers can log in, take control of a robot, and experience the environment through the iPad camera. They can move forward, backward, left and right to move around the room and converse with colleagues, just like they could if they were present in person, but there were some concerns. “This all adds to the experience of being there, much more so than any of the other sort of more traditional technological approaches that we’ve all been using. [Teams] benefit from having spontaneity, from being together, and being able to sort of just bounce ideas off each other. How would that aspect of our creative productivity be affected? We had a lot of conversations about that,” Dr. Hirst mentions.

The MIT Sloan Executive Education department utilizes other interactive technologies as well, including business meetings involving a three-dimensional virtual space in which assigned avatars can sit or stand in a conference room. As people move about the digital space, if a person moves their avatar closer to another avatar, the voice gets louder, mimicking real-life interactions. Dr. Hirst points out, “That creates a really interesting – very much like the robots – sense of being somewhere in a way that is much more engaging than just being on a conference call or even a video call.”

In the future, he would like to add more intelligent robots and technology, including robots that can return to their charging station on their own when their batteries are low, and robots that can interact more physically with the environment, such as pushing buttons, opening doors, or even moving across challenging terrain like a staircase.

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