iRobot Patents Docking Station That Cleans Out Roombas

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 1 of June , 2009 at 5:08 am

Just because we were off at Maker Faire for the weekend doesn’t mean that robot news took a vacation (however nice that might have been). Robot Stock News has been busy digging through iRobot patent applications and has come up with a design for a Roomba docking station that is able to automatically empty a robot’s dustbin.

The Roomba does a decent job of cleaning the floor all by itself. It’s decent enough that the amount of dirt and debris collected by the robot often necessitates cleaning and emptying after every run. This is not a particularly enjoyable task (unless, like me, you take pleasure in spiffing up your little robot friend) and hampers the efficiency and autonomy of the Roomba, especially the Roombas that can be scheduled to clean multiple times without supervision. The docking stations shown in the patent would be able to suck dirt out of a Roomba with a secondary vacuum and store it in a larger, stationary reservoir, thus enabling the Roomba to run more frequently with less need for human assistance, which is the whole idea behind household robots: autonomy.

There is, of course, no pricing or release information for this new dock, which has been conceptualized in a variety of styles but has yet to be verified as something that iRobot is actually developing.

VIA [ RSN ]

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Category: Concepts, Consumer

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