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Electrolux Robot Vacuum Cleaner
An anonymous reader writes "Modelled on an ancient arthropod the Electrolux Trilobite is in stores from Friday and should cost around £999." It isn't the first robot vacuum, but they do claim it automatically recharges itself (which I don't think the Roomba does). And for only 8 times the price! A bargain. Electrolux's website has some more information.
Dunno about Trilobyte but the Roomba has a little flexible rubber arm with a brush on it that spins around out one side of it.. it flicks stuff out from corners so the main part of the vacuum can get it.
I've used mine perhaps 20 times since I bought it, and it has a lot of problems now. Sometimes it just stops in the middle of the room and beeps its "I'm stuck" sound, even though its not. The battery has basically died to where it might run ten minutes on a full charge.
Its an interesting device, but I've not been terribly happy about how its aged in the six months I've had it...
Roomba doesn't map the room with ultrasound. In fact, it doesn't map the room at all. It drives around starting by spiraling out from a room's center, and uses heuristics-based AI to decide when it has cleaned the room. It lightly bumps into everything to navigate around - there are no beams to keep it from bumping into things.
The self-charger is a good idea, and from what I've read the only thing that makes this vaccum superior to the Roomba (and does not justify the price difference). Roomba also can automatically detect a falloff like a stairway ledge, which this Electrolux cannot (without laying down strips). This is true, but is also worth mentioning that you can arbitrarily decide where rooms begin and end because roomba comes with an invisible wall. You don't need to create barricades or shut doors.
It's a pretty neat little device. I sure as hell wouldn't be vaccuming under my bed and couch on a daily basis if it wasn't for this thing going in there by itself.
the CEO of Electrolux (Michael Trechov) visited my engineering school in Sweden and told us about this new cool product - the robot vacuum cleaner. He was using a prototype at home.
I wonder what took them so long to go to market...
Tor
michael, we all realize that you can't post an article without a douchebag comment. And we shouldnt feed trolls such as yourself, but re: your "for only 8 times the price" quip.
The difference between an Electrolux and Roomba:
Roomba is a novelty. I've seen one in action, and it's absolutely useless. A dustbuster on a windup toy car would be more effective.
Electrolux makes good vaccuums, arguably the best. Their product will work. Roomba doesnt.
So you either want a toy, or a vaccuum.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
well, the rover does have a little laser-tag emitter on it for shooting other rovers. If you're handy with a soldering iron, pull the IR LED and stick an optocoupler or a relay on the leads, and you can hook that to whatever cat-torturing device you want! Small nerf gun? 80mm case fan? Tape recording of dog barking?
Plenty of great ideas to experiment with, but the obvious thing to replace the IR LED with is a laser pointer.
Of course, if you are truly ambitious in your cat-chasing expectations, you need to go homebuilt. I wonder if anybody makes an R/C controller that connects to a serial or USB port like the plantraco one does?
We had one in the 'house of the future' as part of the IEE's Faraday Lecture. I was a presenter of this lecture and had to make this thing work on stage in front of 1500 people. All I can say is that it's the most unpredictable gadgets ever, it never did what it was meant to do. The battery life is pants, it hardly holds any 'dust'.
It almost fell off the stage during one show...
http://www.iee.org/Events/Lectrs/Faraday/2001/