It's for mobile telepresence. E.g. you send this to the factory in China instead of flying there yourself. It has cameras and audio and a fancy laser pointer they built themselves. You drive it via the Internet from an ordinary computer.
That would be a bit creepy though. Imagine a factory of chinese workers, all sewing and this this silent rolling monster drifts slowly by, and they all stiffen in fear and work extra hard...
iRobot made something similar called the "coworker". It was a spectacular failure. It was shorter and ( i think ) a bit smarter about remote obstacle avoidance. They asked around $5K.
They never answered the question: why is this better than a conference call? This is doubly important considering it has no arms.
I'm certain there is a market for this or a similar kind of robot. It needs to have compelling remote presence, and it needs to be cheaper than $5K.
Adding up motors, computers, cameras, the chassis, plastic modling, etc. can get expensive fast, especially if you haven't ramped up production somewhere fast & cheap like China.
Why better than a conference call? It has to be it's mobility. (Although, didn't they mention it needed to be tethered? It has to be because it lacks batteries.)
I think that in situations where data needs to be sucked up in a mobile way but not in a way that the environment needs to be manipulated (no arms), it'll work. Well, when it gets batteries, it would.
"Unlike monty, QA is 100% battery powered, and gets 4-6 hours of runtime on every charge. Monty's pneumatics required it to be tethered at all times. Also, its much lighter at around 35lbs. Monty is too heavy to pick up."
It's much lighter than a Segway. Only 35 pounds.