You’re looking at the Navy’s newest recruits: from left to right, CS3 Scooba Stevens, Chief Miles O’Brien, and ITSN Unger. I kid you not, that’s what they’ve been named. The iRobot Scooba and Roombas are just part of an entire assemblage of robots who clean the floors on the USS Freedom, one of the newest and most ridiculously expensive warships in the Navy.

Apparently, the robots are generally free to roam around the ship on their own… Crew member still have to do some sweeping, but the robots help keep things tidy on a day to day basis. Give it a couple years, or maybe a decade, and the robots will be running the ship while humans do the sweeping. I’ll be more efficient that way.

VIA [ Military Times ]

You might have known that Colin Angle, the co-founder and CEO of iRobot, was an engineer. I’ll bet you didn’t know that he likes to snowboard and hates folding laundry (need a robot that can help with that?). Last week Colin was profiled on NOVA ScienceNow’s The Secret Life Of Scientists, and you can watch three more videos from the interview over on their website.

One of the weirdest things (amidst a bunch of weird things) that Colin mentions is to what he credits continued Roomba sales after its initial success at launch back in September of 2002:

“It was the week after Thanksgiving and sales were very disappointing, and we were still a pretty fragile company financially. It was a stressful time. We would get together every morning and [one day] the guy who ran direct sales raised his hand and said, ‘Hey guys, why did sales triple yesterday?’ Well, we didn’t know why. We hadn’t done any ads, there was no newspaper article about us, and we hadn’t been on ‘Oprah’, but sales had somehow tripled. And one of our engineers raised his hand and said, ‘Well, you know, I saw this Pepsi commercial yesterday, maybe that was it.’”

So, uh, thanks Dave Chapelle, I guess we Roomba owners all owe you one.

Or something.

[ Secret Life Of Scientists ]

This article, from Israel’s Yediot Acharonot newspaper, is titled “‘A Vacuum Cleaner Captured a Snake.” It looks like “captured” is a bit of an understatement … The Roomba 560 appears to have totally pwned what we’re told is a deadly viper threatening some kids (and possibly a cat) by sucking it up around one of its rotating brushes. There are more graphic pics of the, uh, end result over on Facebook, but suffice it to say that the poor little snakey came to a rather violent, and probably really confusing, end. I’m not sure I’ll be able to look at my Roomba the same way again (and neither will my pet snake), but it’s good to know that our robot vacuums have our backs when it comes to poisonous reptiles shaped like electrical cords.

Update- Commenter Shmuel provided a translation:

A few days ago Efi Frida(39) returned to her home in Mizpe Avtalyon in the Galilee and tried to turn on her Roomba. after a few failed tries Efi opened the machine and to her surprise found that during one of the vacuuming sessions it caught a Vipera palaestinae. The Roomba is built to vacuum the dust independently under beds and cabinets.

About six months ago Efi and her husband Eli(41) purchased the robot in order to assist them in the household cleaning where two children Jonathan (7) and Yael (4) in addition to two cats and two dogs. “its like having an au pair” Eli says.

One evening last week Efi turned the robot on and left the house. When she returned she tried to turn it back on though it kept beeping and getting stuck. When she opened the machine she discovered that the machine prevented the small viper from occupying the home and hurting her young children. “He was probably looking for a place to hide in one of the rooms because of the upcoming winter.” Eli explains.

The snake was wound thoroughly around the cleaning wheel and has received injuries to his head. by the time Eli returned home the viper died of its wounds. “I like snakes, so for me its somewhat a tragic ending” says Eli.

Eli quickly informed “IRobot” of the situation who were excited to hear of the story and sent the Frida family a remote as compensation. “We were very lucky”. sums Eli. “If the snake would have hid in the house and bitten one of the children it could have ended badly”

[ iRobot PackBot on Facebook ]

Thanks Dave!

For some reason, the idea of iRobot’s (and UW’s) little Seaglider robot wandering around the oceans, listening for whale songs, completely captures my imagination. Seaglider is looking for beaked whales in particular, since they’re rare and very hard to track. Also, they react especially badly to US Navy sonar tests, which may have killed dozens of them. Seaglider’s mission is to record beaked whale songs off the coast of Hawaii to try to determine where the whales live and how to track them. Unlike their larger cousins, beaked whales make higher pitched noises that don’t carry as far in the water as, say, a humpback whale song, which makes them harder to find.

The Office of Naval Research has contributed $1.5 million to this project, which so far just involves one single Seaglider operating for about 20 days. The Seaglider itself is 1 meter long and is capable of operating autonomously for up to 10 months without needing to recharge its batteries. It has a range of 4600 km, or 650 dives to its maximum depth of 1000 meters. It can be programmed ahead of time, and every once in a while it’ll pop up to the surface and stick out a satellite antenna for further instructions. Ideally, a whole fleet of Seagliders would cooperate to keep tabs on the whales, but at the moment, researchers are hoping to use existing Navy hydrophones to help them figure out where to send the Seaglider.

[ iRobot Seaglider ] VIA [ Wired ]

iRobot may have a virtual monopoly on the robot vacuum cleaner market, but unfortunately, there’s not a whole heck of a lot of money there yet. They’ve got their military robots, of course, but it looks like they’re looking to expand their civilian market. No, it’s not a lawn mower division, but rather a healthcare robotics unit, or more specifically, an elder care robotics unit. iRobot is taking a bit of a cue from Asia here, since Korea and Japan have been working (feverishly) on elder care robotics for some time now… Of course, people in Asia (of all generations) generally seem a lot more comfortable with robots and more willing to accept them into their lives, while iRobot as a bit of an uphill struggle with that sort of thing around here.

So what might we expect to see in the way of products from this new division? Here’s my guess: a small mobile platform that integrates the telepresence features of the ConnectR with some kind of simple artificial intelligence that could locate and recognize people, deliver reminders and information based on natural language voice queries, and summon help in an emergency. It would be connected to the internet and could integrate with, say, a doctor’s office or a pharmacy to provide prescription schedules and monitor drug interactions.

Interesting, the only clue that we’ve got so far is not something I would have expected: “an inexpensive, balloon-shaped device that uses a small vacuum pump will let robots gently grab and then lift up various items for older home dwellers. Using a handheld version, Angle demonstrated the device’s ability to mold, blob-like, around odd-shaped objects and then hold them firmly when he used a mini-pump to apply the vacuum.” A grabber and lifter? That implies a fairly complex stereo vision system with object recognition, and probably a significantly more expensive robot. But as Angle points out, institutional care for the elderly costs an average of $10k per month, so a robot that helps people live in their homes longer will have to work hard to outprice its potential market… Especially if it gets insurance subsidies. Hey, can someone who’s read the new health care bill let me know if there’s a robot option in there somewhere?

Incidentally, iRobot already developed a prototype elder care robot, named Cici, which was reportedly on display at a medical devices conference in Boston in December of 2007. Although there were no pictures and iRobot refused to comment, we do know that Cici “stood about the size of a desktop computer and was the shape of a human upper body without arms. The robot has audio features that can be used to check on elderly patients at home and would be linked to a network to alert clinicians elsewhere of a medical problem.”

Press release, after the jump. (Read more…)

Industrial and military robots spend most of their time doing industrial and military type things. It’s what they’re for, after all . But if someone gives you a robot, it’s hard to resist playing with it, especially if it’s an expensive (and cute) piece of military hardware like an iRobot SUGV (Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle):

Aww! I want one! If you’re actually in the army, you’ll have better luck getting one of these than I will… All brigade combat teams should have their own robot by 2025.

[ SUGV ] VIA [ RSN ]

Photo from Flickr user steveaux

We haven’t heard that much from iRobot recently regarding the Roomba, which stands to reason since the recent economy hasn’t been favorable to the luxury home robotics market while the interest in military robots (like the PackBot) keeps increasing. It makes sense, then, that iRobot looks to be upgrading its existing line of robot vacuums with performance improvements rather than developing entirely new products. One such improvement, to be introduced in the Roomba 536, is the “AeroVac,” an improved dustbin and vacuum system:

“Roomba’s AeroVac is the latest breakthrough in bin technology. A powerful vacuum maximizes air flow through Roomba’s cleaning head to pull hair and debris off the brushes and into the bin. This new single chamber bin fills evenly and holds more debris, allowing you to empty it less often.”

Also, the charging dock is smaller, and the virtual walls have been redesigned to automatically set their intensity. Weirdly, the handy carrying handle has been removed, and the 536 doesn’t respond to multi-room Lighthouse technology like the 535 does. Lame.

This upgrade has been reported in Roombas for over a month now with only a minimum of fanfare, although officially, other Roomba models aren’t scheduled to get it until January. It’s always good to see companies working improvements into an existing product line without just developing a new model and charging a bunch more for it, and honestly, I’m surprised that iRobot didn’t do just that, considering their proclivity for releasing expensive Roombas without significant differences from the cheaper models.

[ Roomba 536 @ HSN ] VIA [ RSN ] and [ Robot Reviews ]

Back in April, we showed you a conceptual drawing from Boston Robotics for a squishy robot designed to change its shape to squeeze through holes.

The robot in this video is not that robot.

It’s part of the same DARPA ChemBots program, though… This particular SquishBot has been developed by iRobot in cooperation with University of Chicago, and uses a deformation technique called “jamming” to move around. The vid does a better job of explaining exactly how jamming works than I ever could, but the basic idea is that the robot is made up of a bunch of little plastic pockets containing something that could be, but probably isn’t, whatever they fill beanbag chairs with. Normally, the plastic skin of the pockets holds the beanbag stuff together so tightly enough that it forms a solid. When the pockets are inflated with air (that’s what all the hoses are for), the beanbag stuff gets some extra wiggle room, stops binding, and the pockets turn squishy. Combining a bunch of these pockets gets you a robot with a skin that can be made flexible, rigid, or a combination of both. By controlling each pocket, the robot can move itself around and squeeze though holes, under doors, or into ear canals.

This video is actually from sometime last year, according to IEEE:

“The video shows the project as it was about a year ago. The current stage has a bit different design and is moving toward the ability to include sensors or even connect different blobs together, but those details are sketchy.”

Stupid sketchy details. It’s frustrating to know that there’s an evolved version of the SquishBot blobbing around over at iRobot and we can’t see it. Arg. If anybody from iRobot wants to send us a blurry cellphone picture, we’d much appreciate it.

VIA [ IEEE ]

SPARK stands for Starter Programs for Advanced Robotics Knowledge, and it’s iRobot’s new program to help improve robotics education for students in elementary school through college. While not too much seems to be happening at the moment, SPARK does have a lot of promising partners, including FIRST, CMU, BeatBots, Topobo, and even Paro… There’s a lot of potential here, and of course we here at BotJunkie are wildly in favor of anything that makes robotics more accessible to students, especially younger students who may not even realize that robotics is something they can learn how to do.

All too often, programs like this don’t get past the concept+slick website phase, which as far as I can tell, is where SPARK currently is. But hopefully with the backing of iRobot and its partners, something substantial will become of this program. We’ll keep you posted.

[ SPARK ] VIA [ RSN ]

I’m not sure if entirely understand the point of this vid, but I definitely like how PackBot (via its very own Facebook page) describes iRobot’s tenets of success:

“Build Cool Stuff – A’hem. <..Me?
Make Money - Parts don't grow on trees
Deliver Great Products - Me & my cousins
Change the World - Each time I go in 1st, a soldier's world gets a lot safer
Have Fun - ...This video is the Have Fun part."

[ iRobot PackBot on Facebook ]