When I first set out to do these papermodels, I was planning on doing a series. It’s been a few months since our last papercraft, and our Roomba 562 Pet Series and Hal 9000 Mashup proved to be so popular that it was obvious that we should do it again. Our newest diabolical creation is a mashup between Darth Maul and the iRobot Roomba 400 Series, or as I like to call it, the iDarth Roomba 400. Pretty catchy, isn’t it? Click here to download the papercraft (PDF, 1.1 MB).

I feel compelled to point out that in place of the usual corner brush, the iDarth Roomba 400 has a dual-bladed light saber. There are also important instructions for use on the bottom. To activate the robot, you place it in the middle of your floor and press the “maul” button. What could be more simple?

Have fun printing these out and putting them together!

This is admittedly old news, but it’s definitely cool enough to post here. Among the many products they create, iRobot has a robotics platform for eduction and tinkering that is called the iRobot Create. See here for a thorough review of this item and a page of different projects they have done internally with the iRobot Create. Among these projects is an amazingly amusing hamster-guided Roomba vacuum cleaner.

It’s hard to make out the mechanism they’re using on this robot project, but it looks like the ball is on some rollers. The rollers are probably hooked up to an optical encoding system, a lot like how the old fashioned computer mice with the balls worked. The Roomba is programmed to adjust its speed and direction to match that of the hamster.

Now all they have to do is figure out how to train the hamster to vacuum the most dirty parts of your floor. Maybe there would be some way to train the hamster to follow your shedding pets or messy kid around the house. Either way, I find it fascinating and amusing at the same time.

In the first of what I hope to be a series, we are releasing a custom robot vacuum cleaner papercraft. This time we’ve chosen to do a mashup of the iRobot Roomba 562 Pet Series and our favorite homicidal artificial intelligence, the HAL 9000 from 2001 A Space Odyssey. Click here to download the papercraft. Looking for information iRobot Roombas? Don’t miss our page on Roomba Models.