Slashdot Mirror
Floor Vacuum Robot for $200
abhikhurana writes "MSNBC is running a review of Roomba,
supposedly the first intelligent 'floor vac', as in a cross between vacuum
cleaner and a robot. I think its especially suited for lazy bums like me. Just
let it loose, sitback and enjoy. There is also a video of how it cleans the
floors, which requires windows media player (what else?) to watch it. It seems
that the robo cleaner can indeed do that job for which it has been designed. A
related article on
Techreview has slightly more details
about how it works. There is also a website exclusively for
Roomba."
Remember? Robots were going to do EVERYTHING in the 70's and 80's.
They were going to help us! Everything was robot this, robot that.
Bring us drinks, cut the lawn (solar power!), vaccuum....
I'm going to go read all my back issues of Popular Science, I'll find a robot lawn mower or two.
Are they crazy?!? Everyone knows that nature abhors a vacuum. When a vacuum and normal matter meet there's an enormous explosion. Or implosion. Or something.
Fluffy? Where are you Fluffy?
Table-ized A.I.
$200...
sucks...
ahh, nevermind
Best Windows Freeware
That my Aibo can plug itself back in, but this thing can't? Seriously, how hard would it be to remember a room, vacuum it, and return to a docking station while I'm at work? What good is this thing *unless* it does that? I want my vacuuming to be sort of like setting up a maintainance cron job to run at 3 AM.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
This is the first link in a chain of events that will eventually have Gene Simmons chasing me across a skyscraper with a swarm of robotic spiders!
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
sit back and chat on my video phone.
Evil is the money of root.
Hey! It's R2-D2's cousin: SUX-2BU.
Okay, dumb joke, but it beats the inevitable "That robot sucks!" jokes.
"Derp de derp."
You know the dot-bomb is rebounding when an MIT startups goal is to suck.
My
Limekiller
.... why 65% of americas youth are overweight.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
I can't imagine how clean it will get a room when the dogs and cats are chasing after it and knocking them around. Maybe you have to up the room size in order to compensate.
:-)
Then again, a $200 interactive cat toy might be a good thing, if they never get tired of it like every other one they get.
This thing looks pretty sweet. If it actually picks up dirt and can do an entire room without recharging/emptying then i want one of these babies. The only crappy thing is that it can't get the corners, which seems to be where all the dust accumulates, at least in my appartment.
Maybe it's dog-friendly, but at 7.5 pounds how is it going to hold up to the teething Labrador next door?
Sounds like a lot of fun for when the cats misbehave, though.
"Here kitty kitty kitty..."
Roomba's walk isn't guaranteed to cover an entire floor, but in practice it does a very good job.
So you only get the floor mostly clean. Seems like it could use some more work...
-Tolerate my intolerance
Actually my wife has one. It is worth every penny. I also have a robo-mow robotic lawnmower (made by Friendly Robotics) to take care-o-th-lawn. I think I paid about $300 for it. The vaccuuming is no biggie to me (since I usually never did it anyway), but the robomower has paid for itself many times over in the time I have saved. $500 total spent. Hundreds of hours saved already. That's pretty darn good ROI if you ask me. Of course for those who don't make a point of exercising, the robomow may be a death ticket.
I had a similar idea to this (and probably millions of other people did too) but I thought it would be cool to have the thing solar powered. It would seek out a spot of sunshine and recharge for a while, then clean until it got almost dead, then seek out light again. it would not be able to sweep for long on any given charge, but you could put it in a room and let it just go on and on. maybe it could alert you if it got stuck or if it was in need of a new bag.
There are no trolls. There are no trees out here.
Don't they realize the danger?
According to Professor Frink:
Elementary chaos theory tells us that all robots will eventually turn against their masters and run amok, in an orgy of blood and the kicking and the biting with the metal teeth and the hurting and shoving.
Yet Another Web Site
I love how they never test these in a real American Familys house. This thing wouldnt last a day around my kids.
Legos, flash cards, marbles, mcdonalds toys, stuffed animals with fluffy parts, video games and controllers, dirty clothes.
Now give me a robot that washs and folds clothes, and picks up kids toys, and I can use a Roomba. (And no Honey, you are not a Robot.)
$200 ?!
I paid $6,000 (US) for my RealDoll and it can't move at all, let alone vacuum the floor.
Trolling is a art,
My wife does a lot of sewing. How well can Roomba handle lots of thread on the floor? How about pins?
The problem isn't the vacuuming. It's the picking up that you have to do before you can vacuum.
But first something has to clean up all the socks, underwear, pizza boxes, AOL disks, rejection notices, bannana peels, etc. that are all over the floor. This is the hard part.
Table-ized A.I.
How noisy it is ... all the article says is at a pretty low noise level.
Pretty low noise for what ? a vaccum cleaner ? cos even a low noise one is noisy as hell.
This looks like a ripoff of Husqvarna's automatic lawnmower. Only they have a 100% unattended one, as one model is solar powered !! http://www.automower.com/
OK, so we were already moving to a point where we wouldn't have to leave the house to do most daily tasks. That was bad enough. But with inventions like this we won't have to walk around the house either.
As with the sun's light
My mom was magnificent
Unquestionable
that recharges itself, and dumps its own lint pan, ill probably get one. 150 bucks to never vaccum again?!? Ill go for it.
Now, when it can sort my laundry on my floor by sniff check, ill buy 2 of em.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
in a local paper. It said that the Roomba couldn't completely replace your standard vacumm. It doesn't do stairs, and it has no attachments for things like furniture upholstery, etc. The article basically said it was good if you lived in a small place such as an apartment or didn't have kids, but if you need to do heavy duty cleaning, the 'bot wasn't gonna repalce your standard vac.
Why not fork?
And, apparently, from the too-lazy-to-spell department, too...
I also took Roomba home with me to see how it would do in a somewhat more sedate setting. Once again, Roomba did its thing with a minimum of noise or fuss.
... I don't see any mention of what exactly "its thing" was ... ewww.
Hmmm
(Score:-1, Wrong)
Is it really necessary for us to slashdot their SSL server? I mean, if we're going to trash it, can't we at least do the lesser of the two and go with good ol' HTTP? (-:
(not to mention the mismatched host and cert)
S
Is it running on DEC hardware?
The CEO interviewed says a 10x12 room takes 1/2 an hour to vaccuum. I can vaccuum my entire 1000 square foot apartment in about 3 minutes. It's just not that difficult. Id rather do it myself and be done in less than 5 minutes, than hear that thing's motor whirring and whining for 3 hours while it cleans every room in my house.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
Geeks now have a vacuum cleaner web server!
First one to run apache/linux on it wins.
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
My rugs are vacuumed everyday before I get home...That is why one gets married isn't it?
It's very difficult to get an algorithm to cover oddly defined spaces, especially when there's objects (aka furniture) in the way. Should the robot move the furniture? What if a piece of furniture has a clearance that is below the robot's ability to vacuum under?
Now that I think abou it, the robot probably only vacuums area that it can physically move over, so after a couple months, Fibonaccinumbers come into play and you'll have a dust bunny population explosion. But that's about the same amount of area any kid will vacuum, except that kids will probably skip any areas that don't look dirty (even if they really are).
F-bacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
What about Electrolux Trilobite?
Electrolux claims they were first! Trilobite Pressrelease
iRobot.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
Apparently you are a lonely sole.
Here is proof that we get married.
Though, I'm not sure if it will be with their teeth or the sheer amount of dog hair. I vaccuum once a week and empty my upright three times, once for each floor. I don't see how that tiny thing could possibly hold up against any single room in my house.
And just a little script in Perl.
(doan hit me ;)
For those robot geeks among us who did NOT know, this is Rodney Brooks' company.
Rodney A. Brooks is Director of the 230 person MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and is the Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science. He is also Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of iRobot Corp (Roomba)
He received degrees in pure mathematics from the Flinders University of South Australia and the Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981.
This guy is to robot-geeks what RMS is to Open-Source.
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
Well, one of these would only come in handy if I actually vacuumed in the first place. Now, make me a robot that posts to slashdot, drinks mountain dew and takes naps, and you've got yourself a customer! Laser eye-beams probably wouldn't hurt either. http://www.geocities.com/robot_president/quotes.ht ml
There was a blurb on the Roomba in this month's What's New section of PopSci. They quoted a battery time of 90 minutes, which to me seems like WAY more than enough time to vacuum. However, the blurb said that it can only do 2 10x20 rooms in that amount of time. Well, I don't know what everyone lives in, but it would take this thing all day to vacuum my house which measures in at about 2000 sq. ft, and I for one wouldn't want to hear a vacuum running all day. And I can't just let the thing run all day at work, since the batteries only last 90 min! Guess I'll be vacuuming the old way for some time to come still....
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
Orbots was one of my very first exposures to anime-- even before I ever saw Macross (Robotech), Voltron. My next exposure was a rather good Voltron-like anime OAV that had been edited and dubbed into english by Funimation called 'Voltus 5'. I always considered both Voltron series to be pale imitatons of that movie.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
The whole idea that the entire world thought that the earth was flat until Columbus came around is a total and complete fabrication.
This story was invented by Washington Irving (yes the writer of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories) to show his contempt for the priesthood and for the conservative nature of the church and European nations. And guess what? It caught on and expanded to include everyone that lived before them.
Lets all ignore the fact that every time there was an eclipse that the shadow was round or that sailors from around the world would loose site of land as they sailed or that a Greek mathematician calculated the circumference of the earth and was only 52 miles off.
Jeffrey
Burton Russell
Has a very short piece but he says it best with
"A round earth appears at least as early as the sixth century BC with Pythagoras, who was followed by Aristotle, Euclid, and Aristarchus, among others in observing that the earth was a sphere. Although there were a few dissenters--Leukippos and Demokritos for example--by the time of Eratosthenes (3 c. BC), followed by Crates(2 c. BC), Strabo (3 c. BC), and Ptolemy (first c. AD), the sphericity of the earth was accepted by all educated Greeks and Romans."
..which just shows that the human brain is ill-adapted for thinking and was probably designed for cooling the blood-T P
actually, it has a built in cliff sensor to prevent it from commiting suicide like that :)
May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage. RAmen.
What you need are dust corners. These are little brass trianglish affairs to go in square corners and turn them into radiused corners. They made sweeping and scrubbing easier back when it was all hand powered.
Get those scribbing bubbles by Dow.
all the adds show them as autonomous. You just apply them to the bathroom surface, and they zoom around like they were at a 1970's skate park. According to the ads, they do a pretty good job to.
I always wondered why they didn't use these as the basis for nano-technology.
and my wife and I have been salivating over it since.
no, it won't replace my regular vacuum, nor my vacuum with attachments, nor my steam vac, but periodically running it every couple of days to pick up all the kitty litter? PRICELESS.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
it's REEEAAL short, so it can fit under most couches and things.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Well as Triumph the insult comic dog would say:
"You'll die alone!!!"
The movie Runaway
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
These guys should hire some programmers (and engineers) from The Robomower Company... The mower can handle a quarter acre with all kinds of obstructions...
Also on my wishlist:
1. Return-to-base self-charging.
2. Return-to-base dust bin emtpying.
3. Environment learning. It could develop a map of the floor, and keep track of the dirt collected in different areas. Then it could do a daily cleaning of the high-traffic areas, and do occasional full passes.
4. Take some lessons from Robot Soccer and learn some teamwork. (Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!)
5. Remote Interface with an X10 burglar alarm. (Although "Release the vacuums!" just doesn't have the same ring as "release the hounds!)
--sg
Dupe posts are
Trilobite is about 12000 DKK however, which is 1500 EUR.
Here's the Danish website with Flash demonstration and some information in English too.
Did they even stop to think before giving it a female name? *sigh*
If vaccuming had been fun, it would have been l33t suXor or something...
No sig to see here. Move along.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
A BeoWulf cluster of these.... will take over the world in under 72 hours.
You can't handle the truth.
The technology they are using in the Trilobite to let it map out rooms is really cool: echo-location with ultrasound, just as bats do.
As far as I know, it's so far only being sold in Sweden (since spring 2002) and Norway (since autumn 2002). I've read that Electrolux plans to start marketing it for other European countries in early 2003.
The only down-side about this robo-cleaner is the price.. about 12000 kroner here in Norway, which is about USD $1500. (Ouch.)
I've been drooling over this thing since it was released on the Swedish market, but it's way too expensive for me yet. Hopefully competing products will force Electrolux to lower the price.
Are they targeting the Vienna Choir Boys or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir? Either way it seems like this is kind of a small market.
"She's gone from suck...to blow!"
Murphy was an optimist.
After looking at the assorted websites and reviews (plus the "we're being /.ed so be kind to us" opener), I have to say that this is a cool piece of tech.
For $200, I may just buy one to piss off/delight (depending on the moon cycle) my girlfriend, who takes pride in keeping her slovenly geek-boy's living conditions pristine. (she deserves a medal for that, BTW).
I'm just waiting for version 2.0 (which you know is coming).
Combine the preset programs of it's current mode of operation with a second set of pathfinding and room mapping (tape lines for the inital ala some consumer 'bots?) instructions.
Then the thing would be able to use one mode to find its way to the middle of each room to be cleaned, and be able to drive itself back to the charger, switching between mapping/pathfinding modes as necessary.
Add some floor wax and oscillating brushes, and this thing will rank pretty close to some of those old Popular Science predictions.
Regardless, one hell of a great pilot release, and kudos on the price point!
So they're basing this model on being better than people too ADHD'd to *remember* which parts of the floor they already vacuumed?-for some reason i'm thinking these aren't the kind of people that're going to have an extra $200 sitting around to spend on a vacuuming robot. i don't know what kind of dope they're smoking but i want some, it deeply bothers me that i can keep track of which parts of the room i vacuumed a few minutes before...
-tid242
With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science. --Carl Sagan
Does it look like a chrome piggy bank with marital aids stuck all over it?
I'm going to go read all my back issues of Popular Science, I'll find a robot lawn mower or two.
Since I don't have back issues of Popular Science (and I'm pretty lazy), I'll just search for one on Slashdot. How about this Internet-enabled lawnmowing robot?
It's called a cat. It roams around the house eating anything on the floor and depositing it in a box that needs to be emptied every few days. It was even free!
.cig - what you do after winning a good flame war
Bring on the sexbots.
Which would you rather spend $200 bucks on?
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
Cause a beowulf cluster of these would really suck!
...maybe it was a month ago on washingtonpost.com. Cool picture too.
And they almost work. It takes the little guy forever and sometimes he just gives up. Put him between two chairs and watch the confusion begin. It is a little loud and will get hung up quite a bit. Other than that it works great. Just keep an ear out for it to shut off and go see if it is done or gave up.
I don't think any clean-freak mom in America would want this thing to do it's floors. I watched the video clip in the article, then you'll know what I mean.
First of all, it seems to only floors. And it only cleans "slightly" it doesn't seem like it will go deep into the rug and get that dirt out, it does not seem powerful at all with no adaquate suction.
In addition, it doesn't seem very intelligent. It works by sweeping around an area, then when it detects something, it will go in a circular motion to make sure it gets all of it up in that area. But it can easily roam off and miss a lot. Well, unless you give it a lot of time. In the video, they said it would take 45 minutes to clean the studio. Or a half hour to clean a small room. Do note, half of that time is probably finding the mess. That's probably it's biggest problem. Perhaps it should send out detection lasers (or whatever, the stuff that stores use for automatic doors etc.) to detect if anything is above floor level?
The problem with actually finding the mess in a short amount of time was so paramount that they developed little pods that you put around it, to cage it in so it won't pass them and find the mess faster. While that helps, it really isn't solving the problem. Ideally, you'd start it up and it goes straight to the mess and clean it up.
Right now, I'd consider the thing blind. Aimlessly circling around looking for crumbs.
I wouldn't recommend it. Though, there is very good potential for "iRobot" (the company). Check back in a few years.
Check it out If you are looking for the grooviest vacuum cleaners out there, get a Dyson. Expensive, but worth it.
What about Tobor the 8 Man that I used to watch on the Ray Rayner Show when I was a kid? He was cutting edge "Japan invading the cartoon industry" stuffn and he could do anything!
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
I think someone needs to sit down and define the term "Robot." If this thing is a robot, than so is my washing machine, my dishwasher, and my refrigerator. It doesn't even have enough smarts to plug itself in!
Sorry, I'm waiting for the general purpose robot that is not dissuaded by staircases (no Daleks!) and can do floors, windows, and light carpentry.
Let me know when my vacation flight to Venus is ready...
Hell my first lego robot performed the same way minus the vacuum cleaner (roamed around randomly changing course when it hit something.)
/.ers don't have a more open mind about this kind of tech. for the price of a playstation it can keep light dirt of your carpet, is a great conversation piece, it's a fucking robot, it's geeky, it's kindof cool.
The vacuum cleaner wasn't that great, refering to the movie it just sort of threw the crap around instead of cleaning the mess.
However this is only version 1.0. I'm suprised more
Hell I think I'll get one, I'll start a nice project to hack roomba to interface with a pc so instead of randomly roaming all time it would target high traffic areas like doors and in front of the couch about 20% of the time. Hell maybe a remote control so you target those hard to reach spots or torment the cat.
>
It manuevers around and under everything that is over 6" high. So, it can deal with coffee tables, chairs, beds, etc. It detects stairs and avoids them. It comes with a virtual wall unit (you can buy more), that sends out a signal the roomba won't cross. When I first got it, I put it is my main room. It has a TV, a large L shaped couch, and 2 litter boxes. The room is 20x10. I eat in front of the tv, so you can imagine all that crap. I ran it in there, and I was amazed at all the stuff if picked up.
There are a few caveats, however. Battery life. You can only do "3 medium size rooms". My carpet is pretty thick, however. It is closer to 2 rooms. Plus, the time to charge the battery is 12 hours. You can buy spare batteries and a "quick charger", however, they are $60 bucks apiece. It is designed to do one room at a time, so you just can't put it up on the second floor and let it do everything. You have to put it into a room, close the door, and let it rip. It is not designed as a spot cleaner. If you have one really messy part of the room, you are better off getting your regular vacuum and vacumming that part of the room and then putting the roomba to work. The dirt collector is pretty small, so you have to empty it out after every room. Also, because of all the cat hair, I spend a lot of time cleaning the brushes and making sure the machine is clean. Unfortunately, it does not map out the room, so it may go over some areas that are not as high traffic as others, due to the algorithm that is uses.
My girlfriend thought I was nuts for buying it. However, for $200 bucks, (the price a of a decent vacuum) it is pretty cool. Now, only if it would travel stairs, do multiple rooms, have a larger dirt container, and plug itself back in, it would be near perfect
The article basically said it was good if you lived in a small place such as an apartment or didn't have kids, but if you need to do heavy duty cleaning, the 'bot wasn't gonna repalce your standard vac.
And that would be perfect for me (lazy bachelor that I am) since I could set this thing to vacuum a different large room every day when I leave for work, on a rotation. In theory, the dirt would never build up to the point where I need to do the heavy-duty vacuum--or at least not a FULL run with the big vac. All I'd have to worry about is the stairs occasionally, using my other vac.
Plus, I just want to tell people that my robot does the cleaning-- I mean it's 2002 already. We're officially in The Future now. If only it talked... but I guess the mod scene hasn't begun on this thing yet.
If somebody makes a speech add-on, I'd just make it say "dammit!" every time it bumped into a wall or piece of furniture. And perhaps make R2D2 noises in the mean time.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Did I refer you to this book yet DJFirBee?
Will this thing be smart enough to avoid all the legos I have on the floor? :)
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
To all /. folks who say "What can't it do ...."
Unknown investor to a Mr. H. Ford I'm sorry that we can't invest in your factory for this "Model A" of yours, but it just doesn't do enough. It takes too much of this "Gasoline" to go very far, the travel distance is too short to be of practical value, it can only go on roads, and it doesn't even seat a whole family.
Maybe you should come up with some way of improving regular carriages instead of wasting any more time on this "Horseless" carriage of yours.
Come on now, this is the first edition/first draft. It's only aimed at "Early Adapters", not at your mother. It will improve in time, just as the Model A, improved to the Model T, and so on.
What this does do however is give them a "First to Market" advantage in this country.
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
Huh. And the news media refered to our avatar system as an R2D2-like "dustbin on wheels."
There's been a lot of vaccum based robots already out on the market, and reasonably priced. If you're interested, the Cye robot came out a year or two ago (http://www.personalrobots.com/home.html) and offered a vaccum attachement as well as open source software (under agreement) that mapped out rooms. It also returns to the charger for you. Maybe if these two companies put their heads together they might have something.
Dyson also have one featuring their cool see through canister and dual cyclone technology - shame it's not thair Root Cyclone though.
d el=DC06 for pics and details.
See http://www.dyson.co.uk/range/feature_frame.asp?mo
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
This looks like a total ripoff of the TRILOBITE by Electrolux. I coordinated an event called Swedish Style in Tokyo 2002 (Oct 1 to 15, just ended) where it was announced with Toshiba, who helped them get it ready for Japan and distribute it.
We had the robot running for real for two weeks so even if there is no relation (extremely hard to believe) Electrolux is definitely first and we announced it first.
Check out the homepage which is also better done, at http://www.electrolux.se/ (it was released in Sweden earlier).
The Trilobite automatically maps out the room, has tons of sensors and automatically docks, can be hemmed in by magnetic tape so it doesn't go down the stairs, and when you watch it it seems pretty smart.
For anyone who does not know it, Electrolux probably makes the best vaccuum cleaners in the world, in addition to fridges, and also has th majority of riding lawnmower sales as well apparently. I am biased because 1) my family has used their vacuums for 30 years and never breaks and 2) I just made a commercial for two other products of Electrolux, a steam gun (very cool, clean, stylish, well done..) and oxygen, another vacuum cleaner. As it happens Oxygen gives off exhaust air out the back which is as clean as what you get from dedicated air cleaners; a baby can crawl behind it. Just shows to go ya, these guys must have hurried to make a press release and flashy homepage to not miss out on timing and presumably their investors.
Of course there is a very small chance that this is Electrolux. And iRobot may have great people and this is convergent evolution etc. BUT it is hard to believe that they are unaware of what Electrolux has been doing for so long and this is very misleading. If Electrolux is inside they should get the CREDIT.
Matt Rosin
Telebody Inc.
Tokyo Japan
Is it just me or does it look like she is getting ready to be "taken" from behind?
That's how she earned the 12000 kroner it costs to buy the Trilobite.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?