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.
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
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..."
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.
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.
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 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.
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."
(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!
So you only get the floor mostly clean. Seems like it could use some more work...
Well, to me, mostly clean is much better than the horrible mess I have now.
You can eat off my floors, but not because they are that sanitary, but because they have all that food on them.
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.
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
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.
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.
"She's gone from suck...to blow!"
Murphy was an optimist.
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
Cause a beowulf cluster of these would really suck!
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.
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