At Azavea, we believe that teams are more often more productive when they are co-located.  However, that’s not reasonable or even possible under many circumstances, and we have a few colleagues who work remotely some, or all of the time.  We work hard to enable remote folks to feel like an integrated part of their teams.  Technologies like Slack, Hangouts, web cameras, GitHub and others make this type of collaboration much easier than it used to be.

And now, we also have PadBot.

Justin talking from Arizona with Rick and Matt in Philly.

PadBot is a telepresence robot that enables Justin Walgran (pictured above on PadBot), who recently moved to Arizona,  and others working remotely to move about the Philadelphia headquarters and interact with people directly.  PadBot connects to the internet over our office Wifi, and can be woken up and controlled remotely. PadBot does not have a built-in video conferencing interface; instead PadBot pairs with an iPad and Android tablet that is mounted at the top of the robot.  So far, we’ve only taken Padbot for a few test runs, but it’s been a lot of fun!