A company known more for its computers, ASUS, has decided to come out with their own rival to the iRobot Roomba. It will be named the ECleaner, and will be sold in Taiwan and China. It is expected to sell for about half as much as most Roombas (about US $150).
The list of features very strongly resembles the 500 Series Roomba. It comes with a home base for charging, a bumper on the front, and a side brush. This robot vacuum cleaner will also come with a UV light for disinfection (which in my opinion is a waste of time and energy) and a slot for adding fragrances so that the vacuum spreads them around the room, which also sounds kind of hokey. On the plus side, the robot vacuum comes with a remote control, which is kind of a useless thing on automatic vacuum cleaners, but that I like because they’re fun.
On the minus side, the ECleaner will be taller than an iRobot Roomba. While the difference is about an inch, a Roomba is normally about three inches tall, so the difference is really quite large. Battery life is expected to be and hour and a half, which is comparable to Roombas with an APS battery. Also like the Roomba vacuum, the ASUS cleans more randomly using “behaviors” like running in spirals, wall-following, and going back and forth, depending on its mood.
It looks like the iRobot Roomba is going to have some more competition. A company named Neato Robotics has introduced their own robot, named the XV-11, due out in January 2010 (estimated price is US $399). The XV-11 robot vacuum resembles a Roomba in that it is short, but instead of being round, it has two square corners in the front of the robot. Neato explains that these make the robot more able to vacuum into corners.
While that’s the most obvious difference, it looks like there are others worth noting. The XV11 users lasers and a mapping technology known as SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) to create a map of any room before it starts to vacuum. The vacuum will start by circling the perimeter of a room to create a map. Large rooms are broken up into fifteen foot square areas. A laser on the top of the robot is used to identify walls, furniture, and doorways. Then the robot vacuum concentrates on path finding and obstacle avoidance. Once the initial map is made, the robot will start at one end of the room and methodically go back and forth across the room like it’s swimming laps to cover all the space. This is in contrast to the iRobot Roomba, which uses a few different “behavioral” algorithms to cover all the floorspace in a room, and which works in a more chaotic manner.
Unlike the Roomba vacuums, which use virtual walls and lighthouses to control how the robots go from room to room, the Neato can distinguish doorways. So you can set it in “Room Mode” and it will stay in one room. If you want it to clean the whole house, you set it to “House Mode” and it will go from room to room. The vacuum is designed to clean each room completely before moving on to the next.
Like a Roomba, the Neato XV11 can locate its charger and automatically charge. Some other features it shares with Roombas are: cliff detection, scheduling, a removable bin, and variable floor vacuuming. So it can vacuum linoleum, carpet, etc. The Neato robot is much more loud than the Roombas, which the company explains is due to the fact that the vacuum has more suction. The Neato vacuum also has a LCD display so you can see its status. Battery life is estimated at an hour.
Last week at TEDMED, iRobot, makers of of the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, announced the creation of a healthcare division. iRobot CEO, Colin Angle, presented on the future of robots in healthcare. The new iRobot division will concentrate on developing assistive technology. In particular, they envision helping seniors to be more independent longer by providing robot assistants or nurses.
By doing so, iRobot hopes to “add a million years of independent living” to their customers. They hope to build robots that can help seniors with household chores and even see robots being able to help with administration of medicine. That seems like a pretty huge leap from an iRobot, which is a robot vacuum cleaner, but it sounds like a great idea.
I wonder what scale they will be working on. For example, it isn’t much of a leap to imagine a robot that you can put on a kitchen counter that will sort pills and alert a person that it is time to take their afternoon pills. I could even see hooking it up to a phone line and having it call a relative or social worker if the senior neglects to take their medicine.
I’ve also seen in recent months that robots are being developed to lift disabled patients from wheelchairs to beds. I wonder what other sorts of things a robot could help someone with.
For me, I’ll stick to robot vacuum cleaners for now, thank you.
The iRobot press release may be found here.
