GåågleBot Crawls Your House, Indexes Your Stuff
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 8 of March , 2010 at 12:46 am
Google, and companies like Google, are out there to help us. They take the personal information that we give them, and make sure that it’s as available to us as conveniently as possible in as many forms as we like and from wherever we may be. Problem is, Google can’t be everywhere, so sometimes there are questions that it can’t answer… Questions like, “where did I leave that book I was reading last night?” Wouldn’t it be great if you could just Google that?
You can’t, yet. But you can Gåågle it, with your very own GåågleBot. “GåågleBot” is pronounced just like “Googlebot,” which is Google’s automated web indexer. “Gå” means “go” in Swedish, and the GåågleBot is a go-go mobile indexing robot created from a Roomba. GåågleBot goes about its normal vacuuming business, but as it does, a camera mounted on the front sends images back to a webserver via a wireless card. Using some optical character recognition software, the images are scanned for text, and anything that shows up is added to a searchable index.
At the moment, searching the index only returns the relevant image. So, if you’ve lost your book, GåågleBot can tell you whether it’s seen it, but not exactly where, although the picture it shows you might provide some clues. Problem is, without some modification, Roombas have no idea where they are in a room (beyond what information they can gather from their dock and virtual walls), but if you were to turn something like a Mint Sweeper or a Neato XV-11 into a Gååglebot, it might actually be able to tell you that the book you were reading last night is partially hidden underneath a stack of magazines. Uh, robotics magazines. Yeah.
You can find all the code to make your own GåågleBot at the link below.
[ GåågleBot ] VIA [ GoRobotics ]
Comments (3)
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Comment by Joey1058
Made Monday, 8 of March , 2010 at 6:09 am
Good concept. I’d vote for the Mint machine.
Comment by Ianm
Made Monday, 8 of March , 2010 at 7:11 am
This does mean your girlfriend can quickly find your top secret porn stash….
Comment by Stefing
Made Tuesday, 9 of March , 2010 at 2:54 am
‘Gå’ is pronounced roughly like ‘gore’ rather than ‘go’, so it’s more of a GorrrgleBot really – which doesn’t sound quite as harmless.
