New Roomba 500 Series with Remote Control and Modular Design

If any company groks the importance of the hacker user base, it’s iRobot, makers of the Roomba. Sure, most home owners just want to keep their floors clean, but when iRobot realized that people were buying its vacuum cleaner robots for hobby projects, it embraced the modders and sales rocketed. There’s even a Home Robot Forum on the official site. Read the rest of this entry »

Roomba-Maker Unveils Kill-Bot

The makers of the cuter-than-cute robotic vacuum cleaner are rolling out a new machine: A big, fast-moving, semi-autonomous ‘bot capable of killing a whole bunch of people at once.
Early versions of the iRobot
Warrior X700 “are slated to be ready by the second half of next year,” according to Army Times’ Kris Osborn. And unlike previous offerings from iRobot — which tended to be on the light, bordering-on-flimsy side — the Warrior will weigh up to 250 pounds. It’ll be able to lug a 500-pound payload, and carry 150 pounds with a newly muscular arm. Which will mean the machine is more than buff enough to pack heat.
“We’re looking at urban warfare… It can be deploying weapons systems. It can be doing re-supply operations, taking ammo or water to troops who are pinned down, perimeter security and building clearing,” Helen Greiner, iRobot chairman and co-founder, tells Army Times

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.