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."
-- Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
Re:In case you were wondering...
by
Rojo^
·
· Score: 4, Funny
The cool part about the Roombas is, once you have dissected it and put it back together, you have a handy vacuum cleaner to pick up all the left over screws. ..
"Honey, I don't think you were supposed to have all that left over."
"Nonsense! The company included those for demonstration. Watch."
*clack clack clack fzzzt!*
Umm, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to bookmark the Roomba anatomy site.
And a bunch of lonely geeks are reading about getting inside something that's known for sucking really well.
--
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
Isn't this old news?
by
Arcaeris
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· Score: 4, Funny
"important information on how to kill a Roomba"
I thought we already acquired this vital information circa 1985? You just jump in the air and stomp on it. Or spit fireballs. Or get a starm... ohhhh Roomba.
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.
I'll remember that, next time that happens. Though, if it's a typical sci-fi/horror flick, my breakfast would be trying to eat me anyway.
The best way to kill one, though, would be to make a little trail of dirt that it follows around a corner, where you are waiting with a sledgehammer....
ALTERNATE/MIRROR LOCATION
by
wlnjr
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· Score: 4, Informative
The other location of the same material:
http://www.tla.org/roomba
Roomba experience
by
DeathB
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· 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.
-- Would you do it for some scoobie crack?
12 year olds rejoice
by
pummer
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· Score: 5, Interesting
how long will it be until some brainy kid takes the robotics out of this, hooks it up with an electric lawn mower, and DOMINATES the lawn-mowing business in his neighborhood? Wait, that's a good idea
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.
Slashdot Mirror
...like I was, what the hell a Roomba was:
Roomba Homepage.
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
And a bunch of lonely geeks are reading about getting inside something that's known for sucking really well.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
"important information on how to kill a Roomba"
I thought we already acquired this vital information circa 1985? You just jump in the air and stomp on it. Or spit fireballs. Or get a starm... ohhhh Roomba.
Well, I guess those three techniques still work.
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.
I'll remember that, next time that happens. Though, if it's a typical sci-fi/horror flick, my breakfast would be trying to eat me anyway.
The best way to kill one, though, would be to make a little trail of dirt that it follows around a corner, where you are waiting with a sledgehammer....
...
What happens when you overclock a Roomb- Whoops! There goes the cat!
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Must be serendipity when you have two Slashdot articles, one on dissecting a poor, hapless appliance and one right under it covering when the puny humans pay for their transgressions
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?
how long will it be until some brainy kid takes the robotics out of this, hooks it up with an electric lawn mower, and DOMINATES the lawn-mowing business in his neighborhood? Wait, that's a good idea
*runs off to get roomba*
A Roomba is great until it gets stuck behind your computer desk or wrapped up in something. Might as well get a puppy.
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.