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What's Next For iRobot?
An anonymous reader writes "Ten years since the debut of the Roomba vacuum cleaner and military PackBot, robots are mainstream but still not in every home. Meanwhile, a new generation of robotics companies is taking off. Where does that leave iRobot, the godfather of the field? With its military business taking a hit from the U.S. defense budget, the 22-year-old public company is looking to reinvent itself with new kinds of robots, including a telepresence machine for doctors and hospitals and, further down the road, inflatable robots that could be cheaper, safer, and more portable than their metallic predecessors. The question is whether these new machines will be successful enough to keep the company growing — and add to its legacy in robotics."
$14.52. What does that have to do with anything?
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$14.52. What does that have to do with anything?
He was testing your Internet research skills. You win this round.
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... with the inflatable robots.
They need to design hunter-killer pest control robots next. Why bother fogging your apartment with deadly pesticides when you can let a few (roach/bedbug/beetle/spider)-hunting bots loose for targeted annihilation?
Yes, I know, "What could possibly go wrong?"
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Agreed. I have a roomba that rarely goes out of it's cradle. It's just not smart enough to maneuver around the dozens of obstacles in the basement here. It does OK upstairs were there is more furniture and less 'stuff' - it's great under beds and sofas - but a quiet, smarter Roomba that doesn't choke on Labrador Retriever fuzz would be another sale. I like the idea, just doesn't quite work.....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Should have asked about Maxim semiconductor stock price for a real "jeopardy style" research project.
See they bought dallas semiconductor, who sold a whole line of "i-products" back when apple still meant an apple2-gs.
The iButton was like a 256 byte (byte, not kilo or mega or giga byte, just byte) one wire interface storage device. They had a whole herd of one-wire devices. Basically the one wire was really one wire plus ground and it was kind of like sneaking power for I2C off the data bus. Thats a good research question.
Also its a pessimistic outlook... onewire went nowhere and its pretty much gone now. Insinuating that irobot is going the way of the ibutton.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm FLAILING TUBE MAN!!
Um, AC, I donno how to say it, but that tube... um... its not an arm... I think the robot likes you.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Now, if only it could cook....
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
The one-wire bus is actually three wires. Ground, power+data, and a seperate power wire. The latter is technically optional, but if you want to get a signal to reliably go more than a few meters you're going to need it. I use one-wire temperature sensors to monitor the temperature throughout my house, a relic of an old computerised heating project that never saw completion.
Yup. The Roomba has lots of issues. I think the newer ones at least have a larger dust container, so they don't fill up instantly with dog hair like our did.
Mine had a NiCd battery pack that had a horribly short life span. They should at least use NiMH, if not Li-ion. It should be rated at 1000 cycles to last for three years of daily use.
They could make it a lot smarter. In addition to the exploration algorithm, they should be able to memorize the layout of the walls (possibly with a Wi-Fi web-based API). That would eliminate the need for the infrared "electronic wall" that they use.
It doesn't work well.
I know that there is another company that has long made a Roomba-like lawn mower. It uses buried wires, much like the invisible fence many pet owners use. It would be awesome to have one that eliminates the wires by using GPS and other location technologies to let you map out the area to be mowed.
They infringed on Apple's i* trademark format.
I have a 550 "Pet edition" Roomba, and it works great. I have a single cat (who admittidly doesn't shed that much compated to most cats). I have to clean out the rollers every once an a while, but it's still better than actually vaccuuming. While it can't get into a few areas (behind the garbage can is a big one) it generally works great. I think it does a better job than me (because I don't take any time to move anything).
The biggest problem I have with it is that when it decides that it is done a room, it tends to hide. It might be under the middle of the bed, or tucked under the sofa in the back corner, but it's rarely in a spot where I don't have to get on my belly to retrieve it.
I named mine Saul after Saul Goodman. Better call Saul!
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My Roomba has a MiMH battery.
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How about trying to make robots which don't get tons of hair caught in them requiring attention multiple times per vacuum, or charging circuitry that doesn't break after maximum 2 years?
Bah... that should be NiMH...
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a relic of an old computerised heating project that never saw completion
So you had a bunch of Pentium 4 systems laying around? My P4 laptop kept me warm through cold winter nights.
I'd buy a PackBot if it would vaccum my house. Wheels on a robot? How quaint!
Not 120 but much closer.
IMO, the "big deal" in inflatable robots comes from OtherLab... They've built giant (ridable!) inflatable robots and inflatable robot arms with insane power to weight ratios. We did a special on them at Hizook a while back: http://www.hizook.com/blog/2011/11/21/inflatable-robots-otherlab-walking-robot-named-ant-roach-and-complete-arm-plus-hand The OtherLab project is also part of the same DARPA program (M3) that spawned the iRobot inflatable arm.
My Roomba works great, but I'm a minimalist (lots of open space). I've been amazed at the battery life, it still works fine after hundreds of cycles. I have not had to replace anything in the 3 years I've had it.
iRobot has gained a lot of experience in robots, but they are missing an opportunity to make it big because they do not have focus. They produce such a wide range of products - Military and domestic - none of which has the "Wow factor". I think if they focussed on building something which did a useful job really well, they could become the Apple of robotics. The time is really ripe for it and if they don't fill this gap someone else will.
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Robotics today is where computers were in the 1960's. Back then computers were built for specific tasks, but were not intended to do stuff they weren't specifically designed for. It took the general purpose computers of the 70's and 80's to start the computer revolution. Same thing is needed in robotics. A general purpose robot platform; modular, upgradable and programmable. I'd love to have a robot for all the boring everyday tasks like cleaning, unloading the dishwasher, make my morning coffee and so on.
Look at Kodak. It's nearly dead, but no one seems to care.
We film photographers do. Both of us.
Place nail here >+
I love Rhoomba. Best thing I have ever spent money on. I honestly don't understand the complaints. Other than needing a new part after a year or two, it has worked amazingly. It does wonders with cat hair, as well as messing with the cats. My girl always suggests that they make a roomba that will scale and clean walls and ceilings.
I have the 570, and love it. I've replaced parts along the way, but it runs at least 3 times a week, every week, and keeps my floors spotless. It runs while I'm out of the house, and I only have to empty it once a week or so. The main work to do is to keep stuff off of my floor so it doesn't get stuck, but that helps keep my place tidy.
It broke a little while back, and while waiting for the part I had to pull out my old vacuum. That was a terrible experience after having a Roomba for a couple of years now. Btw, your issue of never it finishing out in the open, while exactly true, is not a problem if you have the remote for it. Took me a few times of crawling under the bed to realize that.
Not bad considering Intel is at 23 and change.
A NiCd battery pack is not the problem. The problem is the charge-discharge circuit. If you do charge balancing on both charge and discharge -- and that requires doing individual cell monitoring and shunting -- a NiCd has life quite comparable to NiMH.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I have to agree. I have one of each. The Neato XV-11 is "smart" and 2 years later I'm still on my first battery. I don't remember the XV-21 from when I bought my XV-11. If I was buying one now I'd get the XV-21. I use it for all the rooms (1 floor) except the master bedroom in which some of the furniture is too low for the Neato to get under.
The Roomba I now only use in my master bedroom. Gone through 2 batteries in 2 years, and *every* time it finishes I have to remove the "brushes" and cut (with small surgical scissors) the hair, carpet fibers and such that collect on the ends. It is *really* a PITA. The only advantage is it's a bit shorter than the Neato so it can get under a few things the Neato can't.
What's so special about film? At least for high sensitivity uses, digital pretty much wins. Even PowerShot G1X has less noise at ISO 1600 than the best color film would, AFAIK. Professional DSLRs, I'd think, bury film when it comes to pretty much everything, don't they?
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Of course, the world would soon be absent of humans, since men would ditch chicks...since they'd have the fun and none of the crap you have to put up from them with.....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
But tibit, they didn't engineer it that way; did they?
They didn't improve the circuit and offer it as a paid or free upgrade. They sold the fancy-looking handle and let us pay for the razors (batteries).
After I was in another $100 in 3 month "disposable" batteries (yes, after trying to load balance at a time when I was traveling out of state regularly..) I was out. I recognized their business model and it isn't in the consumer's interest. It's what schick pioneered; let the customer pay-and-pay-and-pay.
I'd be very interested in another consumer focused brand to unseat them. They pulled an X-10; got the tech folks all into things but then pulled a boneheaded marketing/business strategy.
Would not buy again, to hell with them resurrecting themselves.
I'd rather by from GE/Phillips/Siemens when they have something that's well engineered and supported.
_B
...their latest model, the "Romney," gets elected!
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
No, it's just curious.
It wishes an exchange of information and is trying to create an ad-hoc network with one of its series of tubes.
My roomba 564 vacuums daily. This is quite a change from weekly or biweekly which I used to do. The house is so much cleaner now.
I have a dog, though not a labrador (a crosbreed, not unlike a Dutsch sheperd dog). She doesn't shed a tenth of a labrador, so that matters a lot. In the shedding weeks (only a couple of weeks a year) I need to use the high capacity bin and empty it once every two days. Usually the normal bin lasts 4 days or so (unless I have a party. My friends don't make a terrible mess, but more people = more mess)
The roomba cleans well. Not everything is gone in one round, but usually in 2 rounds it's clean For me this is a great improvement over up to two weeks. If I am going to have a party that night I just order it to clean once extra while I go to a shop to get enough beer and snacks.
As for the battery: Mine is a year old and the only time I had trouble with the battery was when the brush module was almost dead. After I replaced that (for free although out of warranty) the roomba had power enough to clean my room 1,5 times (with the same batteries). I assume they are NiMH batteries, but I cant check at the moment.
I love the roomba (in a non-romatic way) and if it dies (and I am content with the life time) I am going to get a new one.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
For small cameras, digital rules. Same with 35mm. Medium format digital cameras cost US$10,000 to $50,000 while film cameras cost far less. But there is no large format digital cameras, and my 4x5 (100mm x 125mm) Sinar is equal to a 200 to 800 megapixel camera if you scan the film. Digital has yet to match 4x5 and is far away from 8x10 film.
I shoot full-frame Nikon digital for color, but nothing comes close to 4x5 film for large prints.
Place nail here >+
Same here. Have the Pet one for the basement/rec-room/man-cave/whatever. Runs twice a week. Only issues I've had are when he wonders into the laundry room or closet and can't get back out. Some times he may try to crawl under the couch and get stuck, or if my 5 year old leaves some toys out he may try to pull them in.
Over all, great investment for me. Keeps the cat/dog hair in check. And I don't have to lug the big vacuum downstairs and go through that hassle.. I like him.
He does need maintenance once in a while, but that's more fun than vacuuming.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
You'd still be out of luck...women generally don't go for the "nice guy" types. If you come in a too nice of a guy, you end up in the friend zone, and you're not gonna get laid.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Considering that we have had industrial robots that can do quite advanced work
for far longer than I've been alive I find it quite depressing that our consumer
products remain so simplistic.
None of these robots are at all advanced with nearly no adjustable moving
parts nor any attempt at doing anything beyond simple and purely reactive A.I.
Shouldn't we by now have enough capabilities to create a robot that
is more than just a very crude little toy car that moves randomly?
I talking about something that can clean multiple types of surfaces rather
than just different types of floors. Something that can clean walls and
tables as well.
We are after all just talking about something which would need a
rotatable/adjustable robot arm that can move with a certain amount of
freedom coupled with a few different sensors.
I'm not suggesting that it should actually be intelligent. You would still
likely need to move small items out of the area that is to be cleaned as
well as program the task it should do.
Sure the first ones would be expensive (they always are) and it would take a while
to fully mature but this has to come close to the ultimate cleaning tool.
You didn't use google to find out that the charge circuit needs to be periodically reset, as even iRobot admits, or the robot will convince itself the battery's dead when it actually isn't?
An expensive mistake, that I also made on my first roomba.
What I really want is a roomba that looks like a trilobite, and a scooba that looks like a snail, and a looj that actually works.
I dunno, my parents have three dogs and a cat (the dogs are a big black lab, a little shelty, and a medium sized long-haired mutt of some sort) and pet hair is exactly why my mom bought and loves the Roomba. She's had two now -- some dirt cheap thing that may be a knockoff brand, I don't remember (which she still has and it still works, but doesn't get used as often) and something along the lines of the 630 I think, though it's also a few years old now. Before buying these things she was vacuuming three or four times a week and the house was still covered in pet hair; now she has the Roomba set on a timer to run every day while she's at work and just empties it when she gets home. Doesn't get everywhere or everything, sure, but she's happy with it at least.
Wouldn't mind having one myself either if I had the money for it....keep the carpet fuzz in my new apartment at bay...although the damn thing would probably choke on it and die in seconds -- even my actual vacuum gets clogged from just my small bedroom once a week...
The problem with medium format and larger film stock is the sensor. Given the sensor has a fixed area of silicon, it costs the same to fabricate, no matter if it's 1MP, 10MP, 100MP - the number of transistors can vary, but the silicon area cannot. It's why dSLRs are often APS-sized sensors (more sensors per wafer == cheaper), why full-frame dSLRs are pricier (less sensors), and medium format digitals are as they are (you can fit maybe 4 or 5 on an old 120mm wafer, of which maybe 0 or 1 might be viable. A 300mm wafer can hold more, so you can get a greater chance of getting a few good ones, but they have to pay for all the bads. The raw cost of that sensor can be a couple of thousand dollars or more.
The larger formats? Forget it - you'd be looking at high end house mortgage pricing.
It's actually easier (and cheaper) ot make a denser smaller sensor than a larger one.
and it was lovely to come home each day to a pristine floor with no kruft or dog hair on it.Then one day my dog shat on the floor while the roomba was "cleaning". You can picture what the result was.
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
Exactly. Wafer yield is a huge cost driver.
For those who are unfamiliar with camera terminology, "full frame" refers to a sensor size equal to 135 film (24mm x 36mm) commonly called "35mm". APS-C sensors have an area half that size (or smaller), so you get almost twice the number of sensors per wafer. Another issue is the steppers used in the fabrication process are big enough to make a APS sensor in one shot, but a full-frame sensor requires two overlapping shots (so I'm told), leading to alignment issues and lower yield.
Medium format film ranges from 56mm x 41mm, to 56mm x 224mm - all using 120/220 roll film (60mm wide). Medium format sensors are all over the place, but generally 50% larger than 135 full-frame. The largest medium format sensor I know of is used in the Phase One IQ-180. It is a 80 megapixel (MP) sensor measuring 53.7mm x 40.4mm. No large format sensors (100mm x 125mm) exist in the commercial photography market.
Why does sensor size matter? Photography is highly dependent on the performance of the optical system. For a given print size, a smaller capture device would have to be magnified more than a larger device. Optical flaws become more obvious. This is why film photographers want the largest film that is practical. 135 is portable, while 8x10 cannot be hand held. Those old speed graphics used in the old days were 4x5.
A large format lens are very simple designs relative to modern zooms. Most of mine are only 6 glass elements, while my Nikon zoom has 22 elements. The LF lens is very sharp on large format film, but not as sharp as the Nikon zoom. A 16" x 20" print is only a 4X enlargement for 4x5, but it is a 16x enlargement for full frame 135, and about a 22x enlargement for APS-C. It is very easy for modern sensors to "out-resolve" the lens, which is why pros spend thousands of dollars on each lens. It is not uncommon to see pro lenses price from US$2,000 to $10,000.
Place nail here >+
I agree. When one talks about large format, film wins. But you can't really hold those in your hand for very long ;) I have a russian 60x60mm ripoff of the Hasselblad and that thing is certainly good in place of a brick in case you needed to bash someone's head in. I think that cameras that are meant to be carryable on a neckstrap (or wriststrap) are a different class from anything big format. I'd think it's a tad unfair to even try to compare a dSLR to anything large format. It's like apples to apple wine ;)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I know they didn't engineer it that way, but no matter what battery pack they'd have used, it'd end up with the same problem. So blaming it on Ni-Cd ain't it.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
in order to vote with more influence...oh wait...Diebold already sells those.
I'd think it's a tad unfair to even try to compare a dSLR to anything large format. It's like apples to apple wine ;)
You are right - two totally different cameras. However, I was responding to your question:
Professional DSLRs, I'd think, bury film when it comes to pretty much everything, don't they?
And the answer is "not in the case of large format film".
Cameras are just tools to make images and prints. I make large prints, so for me it is not unfair at all. I was using a dSLR for large images, but went to 4x5 film for much sharper images. Google "Clyde Butcher" if you want to see a modern master who creates massive prints.
Place nail here >+
I've done a few rolls of 60 ISO 60x60mm (start to finish, developing the negative and enlargements myself) and that's sure as heck a different medium. The largest enlargement I could make is approx. A4 paper size, and it looked pretty damn stunning in spite of a very amateurish process and conditions. That was back in elementary school, I haven't touched it for 2 decades since :(
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-roomba-blender-makes-smoothie-out-of-everythin,29539/
Table-ized A.I.