Vorwerk's Smart Carpet means slightly more intelligent robovacs
posted June 16th 2005 6:58AM
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]
why do they need to go all over the top and pricy with RFID tags? to look "cool" next to the roomba? tho it is much cooler looking
surely with more processing power (and less RFID tags) you can have something that maps out the room its in and covers the spots it thinks its missed
RFID, AI. It is all too much. It is much easier to train a vac to follow a route. The first time you use the vac in a room, you set it at a certain starting place (say a corner) and then "walk" it through the room over every inch you want cleaned. The vac will "record" this moves. This is like recording a macro in Word or Excel. The next time you want to clean a room, you set it in that room at its designated starting place and let it rerun the route cleaning as it goes. If the route is stored as a series of turns and elapsed time(90 degree left and 8 secs straight, 90 degrees left and 10 seconds straight), it should not take up too much memory. 640K ought to be enough for any one :-) The vac could store routes for say 10 different rooms.
Leave it to the Germans to devise a "neat and orderly system".
RFID, AI. It is all too much. It is much easier to train a vac to follow a route. The first time you use the vac in a room, you set it at a certain starting place (say a corner) and then "walk" it through the room over every inch you want cleaned. The vac will "record" this moves. This is like recording a macro in Word or Excel. The next time you want to clean a room, you set it in that room at its designated starting place and let it rerun the route cleaning as it goes. If the route is stored as a series of turns and elapsed time(90 degree left and 8 secs straight, 90 degrees left and 10 seconds straight), it should not take up too much memory. 640K ought to be enough for any one :-) The vac could store routes for say 10 different rooms.
Doesn't mean much to use hardwood and tile households.
#2 - the recorded route you suggest will work great until somebody moves a chair.
Yes, the roomba is really stupid and barely deserves to be called a robot at all. But uh, wasn't it about the same time Roomba came out that Electrolux brought out a genuine robot vacuum cleaner that did use an AI technology... I forget how it worked but it didn't need RFID tags in your carpet - it's not really rocket science to map and then (fairly) efficiently cover an area even if it isn't tagged.
If you're going to get a robot you might as well get a real one. On the other hand, that Electrolux model cost 10 times as much as a Roomba and probably sold 1000 times fewer. :)
baaaah this is stupid and primitive!
its like those 20$ DiY bots back in the days that followed a coloured line you traced on a surface, except the line is now expensive copyrighted RFID.Plus you have to put them yourself in your flat's floor ; i mean wtf???
They should use a cam and image recognition, thats at least a little bit more hightech!
Don't worry though thanks to all this savage, private and rules-less globalization you'll soon have your very own 1$ per day 3rd world country servant who will be infinitely more efficient than technobabble such as this.
rejoyce...
Here's a visualisation of the Electrolux Trilobyte's (similar to the Roomba) random cleaning pattern: http://www.flickr.com/photos/timo/10401165/
That thing looks like it makes a mean cake too
to Blore40:
The fix path idea would not work in praticle since:
1.there may be obstacles on its way, as #5 says.
2.the robot cannot locate its coordinates due to the sensor error.
For now, I'll say roomba is the most practicle solution.