Vorwerk's Smart Carpet means slightly more intelligent robovacs
Roomba might be cute and all, but even though it's loads more intelligent than your average vacuum cleaner, it's still dumb as hell when you think about it. Instead of methodically cleaning your floors, the Roomba actually bounces around in a random pattern that's modified based on what it bumps into—it can't keep track of what it's doing or what parts of the carpet it's already vacuumed. Which is why a German company called Vorwerk is working on a neat, orderly system called Smart Carpet that removes all the uncertainty from the robovac. The trick is to use carpeting that's embedded with RFID tags, that way the robovac, which has a built-in RFID reader, can know exactly what parts of the room it's hit and what it still has left to do.
[Via BigBlog Robotics]
