- Created by entrepreneur Marita Cheng, Aubot’s Teleport is a robot that allows one to visit somewhere or someone in a mobile video-conferencing experience.
- The Teleport, which has been used in museums and the healthcare sector, is produced in Shenzhen, the Chinese tech hub bordering Hong Kong.
Aubot’s Teleport is a mobile teleconferencing robot designed to offer a more natural social experience.
Founder of Aubot
Marita Cheng, an Australian engineer with Hong Kong roots founded Aubot in 2013. This is a robotics company that aims to create products that help people with their daily lives.
Today, Aubot’s flagship product is the Teleport, a teleconferencing robot that roams around the office, allowing remote workers to talk to their on-site team members.
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Teleport
With a 10-inch screen attached to a height-adjustable pole and three wheels, the Teleport can be controlled using a laptop keyboard and offers a more natural interactive experience than typical meeting software like Zoom.
“With Zoom, you have one perspective … because people usually adjust the camera so that others just see them in a good way,” said Cheng in a recent interview. “Whereas with a Teleport, it’s more real in that it’s not as curated,” she added.
For practical use
Since it shipped in 2016, the Teleport – priced at AUS$4,980 (US$3,250) – has also been used for conducting remote tours in museums, as well as enabling children with long-term illnesses to continue their learning from home or the hospital, according to Aubot.
As a private company, Aubot does not publish its sales or user statistics.
While the Teleport is primarily sold in Australia, Cheng said the robot is produced in Shenzhen, China’s southern tech hub known for its established manufacturing industry.
“There’s a lot of deep skills in manufacturing [in Shenzhen], which made it easy to work with suppliers to prototype quickly and solve engineering challenges together,” Cheng said, adding that the Teleport’s final assembly and quality control are still conducted in Melbourne, Australia.
