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Segway vs. Roomba
Jerry23 writes "We all knew it would happen. We just didn't know when. But Second Life's Cory Ondrejka has just blogged The Encounter: At last weekend's Accelerating Change Conference, Dean Kamen's demon seed, the Segway personal transporter, met Helen Greiner's lovechild, the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, in a climactic crash that will echo through the ages.
And I quote: "That night also had what was, for me, the highlight of the conference. I refer, of course, to the ultimate convergence of technology. The perfect connection of human and robot. The consumate collision of 21st century geek products. I am referring, of course, to the moment that a Segway ran over Roomba."
"
"Yes, some people had problems, but for the most part this fairly unnatural motion on an inverted pendulum went smoothly."
Yeah, problems. Like the demonstrator I saw take a violent Segway header at the Minnesota State Fair last year. While he's giving his pitch, one of the wheels on his Segway hit a tiny patch of water on the slick floor. The wheel spun and smoked like a funny car doing a burn-out, and the guy went down so hard that his head bounced about six inches off of the floor. Next day he was back, with a cast on one arm, and a hockey helmet on his head.
Yeah, the inverted pendulum is a cute trick, but then again, so is riding a unicycle. I wouldn't advise my grandmother to ride either one. On the other hand, I would give her a Roomba. I own one, and apart from driving my pet beagle completely ballistic, it's great.
About the word "if": If bullfrogs had wings, they wouldn't bounce around on their little green butts.
why not combine them into a rideable vaccum for large offices ; )
I was standing about three feet away when the segway ran over the roomba. It was indeed a great testimony to the hardiness of both machines. You could probably make a great game out of it; release a couple of speedy roombas and see how many you can run over in a given time limit.
What I actually found more interesting though, was the number of times people fell off the segways. I've been to a few conferences before where people were taking turns on a segway, and I'd never seen anyone fall off. In about 30 minutes of watching the segway riders at ACC 2004 people fell off at least two dozen times and ran into immobile objects just as much. Also people kept overcompensating when trying to get on it for the first time and were thrown into this violent thrashing mode where they'd feel like they were falling forward so they'd rapidly lean back, causing the segway to pull back and then they'd feel like they were falling back so they'd rapidly lean forward, etc. One guy got into this mode after zipping around waaay too fast and was slammed face first into the carpet -really hard-. Looked like a snowboarder digging an edge in.
My theory on this was that at all the other conferences there was only one segway, but at this one there were two. Somehow the presence of another segway rider was causing people to push themselves too far too fast instead of easing into it.
They are fun to ride though, even if you do look like a dork doing it.