A Roomba For The Mean City Streets

Could street-cleaners someday be replaced by robots? Olga Kalugina thinks so, and has designed the Scarab, an oversized, outdoor Roomba, to do it.

The Scarab would first be deployed in shopping malls where it could easily cruise, clean and polish the smooth floors, but we see a day when robots scour the sidewalks for trash and keep our streets sparkling clean.

Looking like a giant vacuum cleaner, the Scarab uses a pair of webcams to seek out mess and then brushes the trash into an internal tank, which it can empty by itself. It also has a grabber-arm to pick up larger items — discarded Slurpee cups, for example, and runs on electricity instead of an engine like many manually operated street-sweepers.

The big problem, though, is that while a Roomba is safe inside your house, Kalugina’s concept design would be out amongst ranks of terrifying teenagers, bent on teasing the poor machine or even just kicking its face in. Stick this out into the real mean city streets and you’d lose the entire fleet in days, stolen and repurposed or just sold. No, a real street-smart robot would need some kind of defense. A taser, perhaps, or at the very least an electrified shell.

And there you have it. The perfect street cleaning robot would in fact be R2D2. We welcome the future

iRobot Co-founder Helen Greiner Talks Robots

Robotic vacuum cleaner Roomba and floor washer Scooba are Gadget Lab favorites. We also heart the woman behind them, Helen Greiner, chairman and one of the co-founders of iRobot.

In an interview with Reader’s Digest, Greiner isn’t ready to call herself a geek. But she has some powerhouse credentials. Greiner has a degree in mechanical engineering and computer science from MIT.

She says she fell in love with Robots when she was 11 and saw Star Wars and R2D2. Her personal Roomba is called “Arnie, after the Terminator.”

Greiner says robots can help take care of “dull, dirty, dangerous jobs.” Among the ideas for new robots is the Warrior that can carry 150 pounds, climb stairs and do a four-minute mile. Also a robotic helper for Grandma and Grandpa.

Samsung’s New Robot Vacuum Sucks

Samsung’s new Hauzen VC-RE70V might look like a part of a curling kit, but it does its own sweeping. The robot vacuum cleaner goes squarely up against iRobot’s Roomba, with 15 sensors and a set of cameras which it uses to build a map of the world around it. It also remembers where it has been, so it won’t bounce around aimlessly, cleaning the same spot over and over.

The Hoover will be released this month in Korea, but as far as we care, it can stay there. If you can’t hack it , we’re not interested.

LG RoboKing Vacuum Cleaner Features & Review

Neato Robotics wasn’t the only one to announce a robotic vacuum cleaner as LG has unveiled their own version called the RoboKing. The LG automated cleaner uses two digital cameras for room and environmental analysis. By using two cameras, LG has improved efficiency when compared with an earlier LG model, reducing total cleaning time by up to one third.
Some of the other differences between the new model and its predecessor come in the form of noise levels and machine height. It may not be silent technology just yet, but LG does manage to reduce the sound level of the new model to 50dB compared to 63dB for the earlier model. Finally, LG drops the height of the RoboKing by 40mm Read the rest of this entry »