Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the more-fun-than-vacuuming dept.
WannaGeek writes "Jake Luck and John Ioannidis have dissected a Roomba for your educational pleasure. Just the basics, but important information on how to kill a Roomba if you get trapped in a sci-fi horror flick with one threatening to suck up your breakfast."
-- Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
ALTERNATE/MIRROR LOCATION
by
wlnjr
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The other location of the same material:
http://www.tla.org/roomba
Roomba experience
by
DeathB
·
· Score: 5, Informative
We have (or maybe I should say had) a Roomba in our house. I believe it was a beta model. It did a much better job than any of us expected making it around college student rooms, around in a bathroom, and even our porch. The only real complaint we had with its operations was the small size of it's container for storing whatever it vacumed.
It had quite a few nifty features. The led on it slowly changed from green, to yellow, to red as the battery drained. It'd be nice to see that on a notebook computer! Being a house full of computer science majors, quite a bit of time was spent figuring out what its algorithm was for room coverage. While we didn't get it all quite worked out, it seemed to hit all of the room.
Unfortunatly, it met a fairly quick end. After about two days, we found it running in a circle. Opening it up, we discovered that one of the wheel motors had actually siezed. We still haven't been able to find the appropriate motor on mouser or digikey. It doesn't matter too much as the final version should be on its way to us soon enough.
One of the inventors is from the MIT AI Lab. Check out Rodney Brooks for his ideas on heuristic AI and projects like humanoid robots Cog and Kismet.
His ideas, as I understand them, are to build increasingly complex robots using subsumption architecture, i.e. simple behaviors like movement come first, then more complex behaviors are added in layers. His approach to AI is radically different approach than traditional symbolic processing AI.
His research raises all kinds of interesting questions about evolution, emergent behavior, and how to pass the Turing test.
I love my Roomba
by
Pr0sper0
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I've just finally gotten used to having a robot running around the house. While it may seem to be superfluous gadget, let me tell ya it's darn handy. A couple nights back my girlfriend and I set it loose on the apartment while we cooked dinner. By the time we were done preparing dinner we had fairly well cleaned floor with nearly no effort on our part. The best part was as we made a mess on the floor cooking, it cleaned up around us!
The only big failings are the small dirt container and the volume. It's pretty darn loud. Howevr, it does an awesome job with pet hair.
Slashdot Mirror
...like I was, what the hell a Roomba was:
Roomba Homepage.
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
It seems to be some sort of robot vacuum cleaner. Detailas at http://roombavac.com/.
I do like the name of the company manufacturing it: iRobot. I bet Asimov would get a kick out of it, were he still alive.
Now back to selling some science fiction first editions...
Lame Excuse Books: http://www.io.com/~lawrence/lame.html
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
The other location of the same material:
http://www.tla.org/roomba
We have (or maybe I should say had) a Roomba in our house. I believe it was a beta model. It did a much better job than any of us expected making it around college student rooms, around in a bathroom, and even our porch. The only real complaint we had with its operations was the small size of it's container for storing whatever it vacumed.
It had quite a few nifty features. The led on it slowly changed from green, to yellow, to red as the battery drained. It'd be nice to see that on a notebook computer! Being a house full of computer science majors, quite a bit of time was spent figuring out what its algorithm was for room coverage. While we didn't get it all quite worked out, it seemed to hit all of the room.
Unfortunatly, it met a fairly quick end. After about two days, we found it running in a circle. Opening it up, we discovered that one of the wheel motors had actually siezed. We still haven't been able to find the appropriate motor on mouser or digikey. It doesn't matter too much as the final version should be on its way to us soon enough.
Would you do it for some scoobie crack?
His ideas, as I understand them, are to build increasingly complex robots using subsumption architecture, i.e. simple behaviors like movement come first, then more complex behaviors are added in layers. His approach to AI is radically different approach than traditional symbolic processing AI.
His research raises all kinds of interesting questions about evolution, emergent behavior, and how to pass the Turing test.
I've just finally gotten used to having a robot running around the house. While it may seem to be superfluous gadget, let me tell ya it's darn handy. A couple nights back my girlfriend and I set it loose on the apartment while we cooked dinner. By the time we were done preparing dinner we had fairly well cleaned floor with nearly no effort on our part. The best part was as we made a mess on the floor cooking, it cleaned up around us!
The only big failings are the small dirt container and the volume. It's pretty darn loud. Howevr, it does an awesome job with pet hair.