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Turn Your Roomba Into a Household Google Bot
Wael Chatila writes "By adding an on-board computer and a camera on a Roomba, the Roomba can be used to index your home. As a bonus, you can also control the Roomba across an internet connection, and see the images from the camera — a spybot for you to check on your own home while you are out."
Interviewer: How do you like the Google Bot home appliance? ... ... well, there was one little incident that has escalated to a problem. ... chasing balls ... getting run over by my mini van accidentally ... ... suppress -- for lack of a better word -- those images.
Mary Ann Oakes: Oh, it's great! I've never been able to find things as fast as I can now but
Interviewer: "But"?
Mary Ann Oakes:
Interviewer: Do you mind talking about it?
Mary Ann Oakes: Well, we had a dog named Scooter that stayed in the garage and, of course, the Google Bot indexed tons of pictures of Scooter. Playing with kids
Interviewer: Oh, I see.
Mary Ann Oakes: Yeah, well, we immediately took Scooter to "a nice family farm down the street (wink wink)" and asked the Google Bot to
Interviewer: Well, I see how that would be desirable.
Mary Ann Oakes: Yes well, we received compliance at first but recently he's threatened to pull out of the garage altogether if we don't let him show the kids when they ask him to 'find Scooter.'
Interviewer: And will you allow that?
Mary Ann Oakes: Oh, absolutely not. Little Billy cried for days after that happened. Scooter was Billy's dog after all. And I did what any good American mother would do, I took him to a psychiatrist and demanded the most potent and expensive drugs for my little Billy no matter what burden that put on the Health Care system.
Interviewer: Well, isn't dealing with death a natural part of life?
Mary Ann Oakes: Perhaps but it's ever so inconvenient for me to help Billy through that! And now what am I going to do? I can't let the Google Bot show Billy evidence of what I accidentally did to Scooter or Billy will hate me forever.
Interviewer: So you won't budge?
Mary Ann Oakes: Of course not. Who needs the Google Bot in the garage anyway?
My work here is dung.
User-agent: Google-Bot /pussy/
Disallow:
Just announced: The Lower Merion School District of Pennsylvania is now giving their students free Roombas ...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
So you had a fleeting thought of arming robots with weapons and letting the kinds of people who cheat at Counterstrike control those weapons? I think the neighborhood cats would probably be safe, except there would be no one around to feed them and they'd go all feral and eat the bodies of their owners.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
I tried monitoring my house with a robotic camera while I was at work. I figured I could see what my daughter was up to when she came home from school early. The poor robot tried to hide under her bed once when it detected the presence of multiple individuals. That's the last I saw of its output. When I got home, its remains were still under the bed, but they looked like something had repeatedly pounded on its top. I never did figure out what happened.
Have gnu, will travel.
>For half that price, you're better off with Rovio [wowwee.com].
I bought one and was very displeased with it. The camera on it is of poor quality (requires a very well lit room) and the little white LED it uses as a headlamp is almost useless. I toughed it out for a while but the audio over the internet just would break more often than it would work. Annoyingly there's no "press here to speak" button, it just picked up sound from your mic at whatever threshold, so you were usually broadcasting and sending static when it did work. The amount of bandwidth used was pretty high for just audio. Oh, audio was IE only.
The battery life on it wasnt too great either. I loved watching it dock, though. I ended up returning it. Perhaps the Rovio II will be better especially if they opened it up so I could get root easily. Perhaps even a basic serial or usb port for use by tinkerers so we can mount devices its not designed to use. There's a need out there for a good little telepresence robot at around that price point that is expandable and hackable. The Rovio is just a toy. The Blackfin at half the price would be perfect.