We gave you the rundown on iRobot’s new Scooba 230 back when it was first announced in January, but we got to see it in person at CES. First impression: it’s damn tiny. If you’re familiar with the cleaning habits of the Roomba, the Scooba won’t offer much in the way of surprises, but we had iRobot take us through it all on video anyway, and there are definitely some interesting tidbits that came up. Check it out:

As for what’s next for the Scooba, while (as always) iRobot wouldn’t speculate, I did hear several general mentions (from them) of how some kind of wireless technology would be pretty cool. Like, for areas like the kitchen and bathroom where you might want to run your Roomba first, followed by a Scooba, wireless inter-bot communication could allow you to schedule a single cleaning time where multiple robots would cooperate to do a better job. Anyway, we’ll see what happens, but as I’ve mentioned before, it’s wonderful to see iRobot (finally) pushing some new robots as opposed to just reskinned versions of their older tech.

[ iRobot Scooba 230 ]

With all of the new competition in the consumer robotics field, it’s about time for iRobot to show that they’re still capable of innovating new and exciting things. AVA, their technology demonstrator, definitely fits into the new and exciting category.

AVA is short for ‘Avatar,’ although iRobot was careful not to call it a telepresence robot so as not to restrict perceptions of what it’s capable of. AVA is capable of fully autonomous navigation, relying on a Kinect-style depth sensing camera, laser rangefinders, inertial movement sensors, ultrasonic sensors, and (as a last resort) bump sensors. We got a run-down a few days ago at CES, check it out:

All of the sensor data crunching is taken care of by a heavyweight on-board computer, but the brains of the operation is really whatever AVA happens to be wearing for a head, in this case, a tablet PC. This makes it easy to develop applications to control the robot, which is a concept not unlike the iRobot Create: the building a robot part is done for you, leaving you to focus on getting said robot to do cool stuff.

There are also a bunch of interesting ways to interact with AVA. You’ve got the tablet of course, if you want to do things the hard way. A second Kinect camera on the bot can detect people and recognize gestures, and an array of microphones can detect and interpret voice commands. Finally, AVA’s round ‘collar’ piece has touch sensors all the way around, offering an intuitive way to steer AVA around.

While iRobot wouldn’t speculate on what’s coming next for AVA (disappointing), telepresence is an obvious first application. AVA also has a bunch of expansion ports that you can attach stuff to, which obviously makes me think manipulators. Personally, I’m hoping that now that AVA is out in the open, iRobot will keep us updated with some of the new ideas that they’re playing around with.

[ iRobot ]

Along with the new Scooba 230, iRobot has today unveiled a redesigned version of the Roomba, the 700 series. There are three different models: the 760, 770, and 780, and similar to other Roomba series, they mostly seem to differ from each other in frills. Here are the core upgrades from the 500 series:

-New design is smaller and sleeker.

-Battery life is 50% longer than previous generations (although it’s not clear whether they’re talking about the ‘premium’ Roombas with the increased battery life).

-I’ll quote this from the PR: “Persistent Pass Cleaning Pattern – when Roomba senses excessive dirt and debris, it uses a brush-like, back and forth motion to focus its cleaning effort in the dirty area it has detected.” Interesting; we’ll have to see it in operation.

The 770 and 780 include a few extras not present in the 760:

-Also quoted from the PR: “Debris Detector uses an optical sensor to detect larger, soft particles on the floor like popcorn, lint or paper chads, so Roomba can respond by focusing its cleaning pattern to ensure deeper, concentrated cleaning in that area.” The 760 doesn’t do this, so we’ll have to find out how exactly this differs from the regular ‘dirt detect’ feature that the 500 series Roombas have, and whether that feature is present in the 760.

-They both light up an indicator light when their dust bins are full.

-The 780 has a fancy capacitive touch sensor interface. No more buttons!

The Roomba 760 starts at $449; the 770 and and 780 will certainly be more expensive, possibly in $50 increments but we’ll find out shortly… We’ll be getting our first look and hands-on at CES starting Tuesday, and we’ve just scheduled a personal demo and interview on Friday, so stay tuned.

We’ve been begging iRobot to come out with something new and different for years now, and with the success of the Neato XV-11 and the Mint Sweeper, they’ve kicked things up a notch (or two) with four new models: the Scooba 230, and Roomba 760 770 and 780. It’s probably no coincidence that CES starts on Tuesday, and we’re going to make sure to get some demos and an interview while we’re there. In the meantime, here’s the rundown on the new mini-Scooba, the 230, and there’s a video of it in action too.

-At 6.5″ in diameter and 3.5″ tall, it’s tiny, and much better at getting around bathrooms than a full size Scooba.

-Uses either regular water or a soap solution to wash, scrub, and then vacuum up the dirty water to clean your tile or sealed hardwood floors, just like a full-size Scooba. Clean and dirty water are kept separate.

-It’s got all the same navigation abilities as the rest of iRobot’s cleaning robots and can use virtual walls.

-Cleans in either a 20 or 45 minute cycle, depending on the size of the room, but offers ‘single button’ operation so I’m not sure yet whether that’s an automatic thing or not.

-The dirty water can be dumped out by holding the robot over the sink; fill it with clean water directly from a faucet. The brushes pop out for easy cleaning.

-Looks like there’s a dock of sorts, but it may not be self-docking or self-charging.

-$299, available this spring.

[ iRobot Scooba 230 ]

On Tuesday, we posted a video from iRobot showing a Roomba in a floor coverage lab test. In the video, it appeared as though the Roomba missed some areas in the center of the room, but this is because there were pegs in the floor (which you can’t really see, even in HD) designed to simulate the legs of furniture, and the robot was cleaning around those. So, the coverage pattern was really pretty good.

The whole suite of features that I was talking about in that post are now called iAdapt. It’s important to point out, though, that iAdapt is not anything new, it’s just a way for iRobot to refer to their cleaning features in a market environment where consumers now have a choice between robotic cleaning systems offering lots of new technology. 500 series Roombas have had iAdapt all along, iRobot just wasn’t calling it that.

While it may be true that most consumers aren’t really aware of the technology that allows the Roomba to do what it does, calling it iAdapt isn’t going to solve the core perception problem of Roomba not being intelligent, or at least, not being as intelligent as other cleaning robots that can localize themselves. As commenters on our previous post pointed out, iRobot isn’t in trouble yet, because they’ve had the market to themselves for so long and they still have much more brand recognition than either Mint or Neato. But, it’s just too easy to look at (say) Neato and Roomba side to side and say that Neato is smart and fast and Roomba is dumb and slow, even if it’s not at all true, which it isn’t. It would be another thing if Roombas were substantially cheaper, but they’re not, and iRobot likes to push the expensive ones anyway.

Even though I don’t think that iAdapt is going to do much for Roomba as a brand, it (and the media event in NY where it was discussed) signals that iRobot is starting to understand that it’s no longer enough to just produce a cleaning robot… It has to be a technologically sophisticated cleaning robot, in a competitive sense, as consumers are presented with multiple options. Does this mean that iRobot will be introducing something new in the near future? We keep hoping that it’ll happen, and I’m sure that it will happen eventually… But the longer iRobot waits, the harder it will be for them to win back consumers who have purchased a different, “smarter” cleaning robot instead.

[ iRobot: Engineering Awesome ]

The picture, btw, is the setup for a long exposure floor coverage demo. You can view the result at the link above.

iRobot’s YouTube channel has been sadly dormant for the last few years, after a promising 2009 launch packed with weird prototypes and engineer answers. Yesterday, iRobot uploaded a whole bunch of new videos focused on showcasing the features of the Roomba, perhaps feeling a little bit left out after all the recent buzz about the Neato XV-11 and Mint.

The above video, for example, shows a lab test of floor coverage. However, I can’t help but point out that it’s not clear just how long the robot took to achieve this amount of coverage (but it seems like it was a pretty long time), and that it missed areas in the center of the room. It’s the same sort of thing with the rest of the videos: yes, Roomba can follow walls, and yes, it can vacuum around chairs. But these features (besides dirt detection, which is admittedly both handy and cool) are no longer distinguishing, and again, we haven’t seen any significant improvements to the underlying technology for years, while other companies innovate and introduce new products.

I love iRobot, I just really miss their continuing commitment innovation when it comes to consumer robotics.

[ iRobot @ YouTube ]

This is a set of all of the different long exposure pics that I’ve taken while doing reviews of cleaning robots. I spent a likely excessive amount of time reviewing each robot in detail (and you can read those reviews at the links below), but really, the pictures explain the cleaning patterns better than I ever could. It’s illuminating (so to speak) to see them all right up against one another, so here they are:

iRobot Roomba 560, 45 minutes

Neato Robotics XV-11, 12 minutes

Evolution Robotics Mint (Sweeping Mode), 15 minutes

Evolution Robotics Mint (Mopping Mode), 23 minutes

Three very different robots, three very different cleaning techniques. Check out the individual reviews for more details on each.

[ iRobot ]
[ Neato Robotics ]
[ Evolution Robotics ]

iRobot has had a virtual monopoly on the consumer robot vacuum market since they introduced the Roomba in 2002. But with some new competition this year, there’s now a real perception problem when consumers compare a Roomba’s cleaning technique to that of Mint or the Neato XV-11, which are able to localize themselves, map a room, and clean in straight efficient lines. Irrespective of whether ‘smart’ cleaning is more or less effective (and iRobot argues convincingly that its unstructured patterns do in fact clean better), Roomba’s pseudo-random behaviors seem less sophisticated and ‘dumber’ by comparison. The Roomba, which (I would argue) hasn’t seen a significant upgrade since the release of the third generation 5xx series in 2007, is going to need some kind of upgrade, because consumers are now expecting household robots to be smarter.

This patent application, last updated in April of this year and unearthed by Robot Stock News, seems to suggest that iRobot is at least considering adding localization to their line of cleaning robots. The patent is for a “Celestial Navigation System for an Autonomous Robot,” and works by using (and stop me if you’ve heard this one) a projector to put IR spots on your ceiling that the robot uses to figure out where it is. Yep, sounds a lot (suspiciously a lot) like NorthStar, used by Mint. And just like NorthStar, if iRobot implements this system it’s going to mean that you’d need a projector in every room you want cleaned.

The Celestial Navigation patent does talk about a bunch of potentially interesting features… For example, each room gets its own ID, so you could schedule your robot to clean specific rooms at specific times, and then monitor its progress on a remote. And there’s even the suggestion that the beacons will be powered wirelessly by the robot itself.

Also, since Roombas can sense dirt, they might be able to create a “dirt map” of your house, and then spend more time cleaning the dirtier areas. The patent says that this technology could easily be adapted for “floor waxing and polishing, floor scrubbing, ice resurfacing, unfinished floor sanding, stain/paint application, ice melting and snow removal, grass-cutting, etc” but we’ve heard that kind of thing before.

Using a localization system and cleaning in straight lines would be a notable shift in cleaning philosophy for iRobot. If you remember, iRobot has told us that on surfaces like carpet, the multiple angle approach cleans more effectively than a single pass, so I’m not sure how they’re going to justify what seems to be a very traditional straight line approach. Of course, besides the patent, there’s no actually indication that they’re going to be DOING any of this, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

[ Patent (PDF) ] VIA [ Robot Stock News ]

Thanks Thorn!

Those cute little Landroids (disposable robots that work together to form a mobile local area network for soldiers) that iRobot is developing for DARPA have been evolving, and now sport all kinds of new hardware, including:

-Cliff sensors
-Front obstacle sensors
-Yaw sensors
-Four video cameras
-Two way audio
-And an optional laser scanner

Check out the video here.

That seems like a heck of a lot of hardware to stand up to the hypothetical $100 per bot mass production price, and I really, really hope DARPA stands firm on that point. I mean, I have to wonder if all of this stuff is really necessary to fulfill the Landroid’s mission. I loved the original concept which was basically just a little disposable tracked robot that turned into an internet node. Yes, having four cameras and a laser sensor makes it better at finding its way around, but is that critical equipment when you could just use a little camera and vision software like this prototype from the previous generation? More capabilities and increased adaptability are certainly valuable, but at some point Landroid will turn into something bigger and more expensive and not a Landroid at all. Besides, the whole point of a cheap and disposable node in an adaptive network is that if one node gets lost/stuck/destroyed/stolen by me, another one can just take its place.

[ iRobot Landroids ] VIA [ Robot Stock News ]

CNET’s Daniel Terdiman, aka lucky sod, got to spend the day checking out iRobot’s headquarters in Massachusetts. While there he got some footage of these Roomba reliability testing chambers, where Roombas (tethered to power sources) vacuum until they can vacuum no more, at which point someone figures out what happened, fixes it, and then puts them back to work.

Daniel also spoke to iRobot’s president of government and industrial robots division, Joseph Dyer, who had a few things to say about military robotics. More, after the jump. (Read more…)