Roomba: The Future for Domestic Robots

The first thing my wife and I said when we saw the Roomba in the store was, “Naw, we don’t need a robotic floor cleaner!” But then we read the side of the box some more and began to realize that we were looking at a marvelous convenience that any busy pair of parents with over-scheduled kids and a doggedly exuberant 95 lbs canine could actually use. Like meals with fiber and zero trans-fat, this was a good thing for us.

So, we bought it in act of pure impulse. Usually, we cautiously research and digest appliances before even setting one foot onto the sales floor. But this time, we ran wild and snapped up our little red robot. We have not been disappointed.

If you haven’t seen one up close, it has all the sci-fi robotic gee whiz of a hockey puck. Actually, it’s more like a puck the size of a dish plate mounted on a pair of tires that came from your 10 year old son’s radio-controlled stunt car. But the innards are slick. A small but powerful vacuum is housed over the little dirt bin in the back panel. It’s an elegant design: just a squirrel cage fan that creates enough suck to draw dirt into the bin as it flies up from the rotating brush. It does a fantastic job on oak flooring as well as on the tile in the upstairs bathroom and on our area rugs, too.

Now since we have a big dog that sheds, there’s always tumble-lumps of fur in the corners. The Roomba handles these without a problem. However, after each cleaning when I empty the bin, I also have to clean the fur off the rotating brush and from the wheels.

So, how does thing work? The Roomba uses the AWARE robotic intelligence system to monitor a collection of on board sensors to guide it through the room as it cleans. When it gets under a chair and bumps into a leg, it will back up a little and turn left. That’s it. Instead of saying to itself, “Great Scot! I’ve discovered the chair at map grid coordinate 34b-2!”; it says “Oops, hit something. Gotta turn.” Then it will hit the next leg perform the same maneuver until it has a clear path. There are also sensors on the underside that monitors the amount of dirt on the floor and whether there’s a floor there at all. This comes in very handy when I set it to clean the landing on our stairs because it can sense the edge of the stairs and then safely turn away.

So, you figure I ought to be content with it at this point, right? It cleans the main floor of our house, plays a little victory tune and shuts down. That’s as cool as it gets, right? Nope…even cooler.

You can hack your Roomba.

I’m not kidding and it’s easy. The maker, iRobot has put an interface into the side of the little brute so that you can connect your PC to your Roomba via a 9-pin cable and talk to it via the terminal application on your computer. They have also put the pdf instructions on-line (http://www.irobot.com/sp.cfm?pageid=294). The Roomba has the capacity to play simple ditties programmed into it as well as let the user manipulate a bunch of other settings. Sure, it’s not going to let you program it to unfold concealed missile launchers nor will it begin the Robot Revolution. But the neat thing is that this appliance that will let you take it to something beyond being a vacuum cleaner. Roboticists have mounted web cams on their Roombas, they have adapted it to be steered by a hamster crawling in a ball. They have even adapted it to fetch a can of brew from the fridge. There is even a way to hack your Roomba so that you can control it with your Nintendo Wii controller.

While poking around the iRobot website for information on hacking my little red robot, I came across their next robot offering: the ConnectR, a “virtual visiting” robot. My jaw dropped. The ConnectR robot is designed to let a user visit and interact at a location remotely via the web. Here’s how it works: a speaker, microphone, and video camera have been mounted on the Roomba chassis. This communicates wirelessly with your household computer network system. A remote user can drive the ConnectR around its environment via a high speed web connection. They can see, hear, and talk to people and pets in the room, too. Say, for example you were away on business and your son’s fifth birthday was happening while you were away. With the ConnectR, you can still be there and watch him open the fielder’s glove you bought him. Of course, you wouldn’t get to have cake or ice cream. But you could see him and talk with him and warn your daughter to stop pinching him. You could also have a first hand view of what it looks like to have that big yellow toy truck crash into you.

Remember, we’re talking about a small household appliance here. “Awesome” fails to do this justice.