[lit-ideas] Housecleaning via satellite...
- From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2004 13:57:06 -0800
Can you outsource vacuum cleaning to Russia?
Data entry, software development, customer support, call centers, tax
preparation - any type of work that can be done remotely has been outsourced
to India, China or Russia. What is next?
Vacuum cleaning the floors of America seems to be an unlikely candidate. You
need to be physically present to operate the vacuum cleaner. American
robotics manufacturer iRobot, Inc. and the Russian space agency beg to
differ. A fleet of iRobot's vastly popular Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners
will be remotely operated out of semi-abandoned space flight control center
in Plesetsk, a remote town in the Russian frigid far North, beyond the Polar
circle.
While iRobot's Roomba Floorvacs
(http://www.roombavac.com/products/default.asp ) can operate completely
autonomously, sometimes additional remote control could be beneficial,
especially when sweeping the floors of factories, office spaces divided by
cubicles, warehouses and other businesses. To address this market, iRobot
announced a new model of Roomba, complete with the remote control and
inexpensive wireless camera.
To capitalize on the growing a ubiquity of WiFi wireless LANs, iRobot
cleverly choose WiFi as a communication medium, thus allowing connecting the
robo vacs to the enterprise LANs and on to the Internet. As a result, the
floor sweepers can be controlled from any in the world.
In a joint venture with the Russian space agency, a remote control center
will be set in Plesetsk (plesetsk.org) and staffed by local cadres. The
choice of Plesetsk is not accidental. One reason is that the salaries in
Plesetsk are much lower than in Moscow: $200 a month is viewed as a rather
generous pay. The main reason however is the available infrastructure and
abundance of highly qualified workers trained to remotely operate Russian
military and civilian satellites and even the Lunokhod
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_1), the Russian Moon rover. Being
similar to American Opportunity and Spirit Mars rover, the Lunokhods roamed
the surface of the Moon in early '70s.
"After finding the path between the huge boulders 300,000 mi away, in 1/6
gravity, navigating the floors of Boeing assembly plant in Seattle will be
like walk in the park,"- says Fedor Krivoruchko, 62, who had to sell vodka
and sausage as a street vendor after he was laid off from the space center
as Russian space program was drastically downsized following the collapse of
the Soviet Union.
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