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What Comes After the Roomba?

• buboard 8y ago
  And even roomba is very mediocre. I dont even use it and when i do i know its going to do a lousy job. It's still a demo.
  • enra 8y ago
    I don't have a roomba but some cheaper version. I let run every other day in 1BR apartment it picks up two fist sized chunks of dust each time. Seems useful for me to get that dust out that would otherwise float around or collect on surfaces, with few mins of work of emptying it.
  • tareqak 8y ago
    I know a colleague who bought the Braava, the mopping robot made by also manufactured by iRobot (the Roomba's manufacturer) based on my guarded recommendation that it has limitations, but it is still pretty helpful. She came back and said that she was happy having a device that reduced the number of times she would have to do the mopping herself. I agree that the marketing behind these devices over promises their real-world capabilities, but if compare this marketing to that of other kinds of appliances and household products, then it is pretty much the same. Maybe totally honest accounts of product performance don't sell well because potential customers have been conditioned by marketing that promises the world?
    • buboard 8y ago
      Almost all household devices are better than the manual thing. It's a bit frustrating that mopping is not.
    • reaperducer 8y ago
      I loved the Braava when I had it. But it turns out that using harsh floor cleaners in the reservoir will destroy the machine. I'll get the Scooba when I save a bit of money.
  • wvenable 8y ago
    My wife LOVES our Roomba. It's the only way the carpets vacuumed in our house. I bought it on a whim but if it breaks I'm sure we'd buy another one.
    • Moru 8y ago
      The things might do an average job of picking up the big dust but what about the really small particles that gets stuck in the HEPA filter of a good hoover? Does it just blow it up in the air so I have to breathe it in? This is where all the pollen and toxins from fabrics gets collected, nothing you want to get into the lungs. The work a roomba would manage in our appartment I can do manually within 15 minutes so it feels like a waste of money and environment.
      • reaperducer 8y ago
        what about the really small particles that gets stuck in the HEPA filter of a good hoover? Roombas have a HEPA filter.
        • post_break 8y ago
          You can have a HEPA filter, but it's not going to do jack if it doesn't have suction and vibration power.
      • outworlder 8y ago
        Do you vacuum for 15 minutes every day? If so, it's a waste. A vacuum plugged into the power outlet drawing 10 amps will do a better job of course. But if you don't do it every day, than having one on schedule every day can still be beneficial. Specially if air quality is your concern.
  • freehunter 8y ago
    I run mine every day. I know it's not going to get 100% of the house clean on the first pass, but as long as the house doesn't get dirtier than the Roomba can clean in one day, we're good. If the Roomba gets 50% of the house clean every day and the house only gets 25% dirtied every day, then every day my house gets 25% cleaner. It's a life saver with two shaggy dogs and hardwood floors. If you run it very infrequently, it'll never have a chance to catch up. You also need to replace the filters every so often in order to keep the proper amount of suction.
    • ghaff 8y ago
      Dogs seem to be a common factor. Personally I’m not too fussy and just let my housekeeper handle things every couple of weeks. But with dogs you really do need to keep up.
    • cr0sh 8y ago
      My wife and I have bought 5 or 6 roombas over the last several years. We have a 2000sf house, and run the roomba multiple times a day. We run each one so often, that we generally replace the batteries and other parts in it multiple times until the machine finally dies in some weird manner. Our last one "died" when one of the photodetector sensors went out on it. I looked into fixing it, but it was one of those jobs that required you to take nearly half of the robot apart (and the screws are not all the same, and there were something like 40+ screws to juggle) just to solder in a small phototransistor. Without that part, the roomba just goes in a circle and then stops. Instead, we bought another, and that roomba ended up in my junk pile with the others (I'm slowly building a (broken) roomba army to take over the world - don't tell anyone)...
  • chrisper 8y ago
    I had a roomba and sold it because it kept cleaning the same spot. Now I have a Neato D7 with a floor map and it does a great job. It has its own issues but once it gets going it's better than roomba
    • JoeAltmaier 8y ago
      There are half a dozen Roomba models, including ones with a floor map
    • outworlder 8y ago
      Any issues with getting stuck on stuff laying around the ground? I have an older model which incredibly stupid at times.
  • bfuller 8y ago
    I disagree. I have two dogs, so pet hair everywhere, and my little buddy roomba runs twice a day and I never have to manually vacuum.
  • esturk 8y ago
    I thought the same until I realize my Eufy can vaccum under my bed, sofa and hard to reach places as long as your furniture is high enough. This becomes apparent when I clean the dust bin every fortnight by how much actually gets sucked up. I turn it on and it would automatically go back to recharge. I would argue it's much more than a demo at this point.
  • tapoxi 8y ago
    I didn't get the point until I picked up the high end model (980) with SLAM, allowing it to vacuum my whole apartment and re-dock itself without needing to worry about stupid infrared beacons to section off rooms. It does a fantastic job, especially since I have a dog that sheds everywhere. I'd compare it to a dishwasher. There's some prep and its a luxury, but I can't see myself living without a robot vacuum in the future.
  • outworlder 8y ago
    Oh no it's not. I don't have a roomba, but I do have a Neato. I know that that thing is not able to, nor it is supposed to, completely replace cleaning up the floors. But it helps immensely in reducing the amount of dirt that accumulates day to day. This problem is even worse as I own a dog. If I do have a complaint, is that the navigation software is a blackbox that I can't tinker with. If I could upload floor plans, or otherwise program the thing, it could potentially do a much better (and faster job). And boy does it get tangled in power cords, or even drier sheets. That's annoying. I'm actually debating buying a second robot vacuum for the other floor.
    • cheeko1234 8y ago
      I agree. The Neatos with their LIDAR are way better. I actually hooked up an ESP12 to it to have internet access to the vacuum functionality, from starting a job, the raw lidar data, or manually moving it. https://github.com/sstadlberger/botvac-wifi https://github.com/sstadlberger/botvac-wifi
• blakesterz 8y ago
  I'm surprised (or maybe I just missed it) there isn't a Roomba thing to mow the lawn that works as well as the Roomba does for floors. That is, does a decent, but not perfect job. Maybe this is a harder problem to solve mostly due to the danger?
  • JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
    Young me dreamed of this, older me realizes how dangerous a robot slinging a blade around without supervision is.
    • dbcurtis 8y ago
      There is a robotic snow blower competition, run by U of Michigan, I think. The failure scenarios for that are even more frightening to think about.
  • alkonaut 8y ago
    I think robot mowers do a bettter job than robot vacuums simple because it is (for reasonably simple lawns) a simpler problem. A house with some levels, stairs, chairs is a very hard problem for a roomba.
  • justtopost 8y ago
    Carpet is pretty flat. Lawns appear flat, but are often not even close. Traction, spinning murderous blades, neighborhood kids and pets, lack of physical boundries, rocks, etc. It is a much more difficult problem. I understand there have been 'fixed path' models for years however.
    • Thlom 8y ago
      Automatic lawn mowers are very normal in Norway. They are quiet and because they mow the lawn daily are better for the lawn as all the cuttings goes back to the ground. Most models requires an electromagnetic boundary, but geofenced versions are starting to come now. I've never heard of any accidents involving humans, but I know there have been some concern that they can cause harm to hedgehogs.
• Endama 8y ago
  I think robots have an uncanny-valley effect not just in aesthetics, but utility. For example, I actually really like my roomba because it only does one thing: it cleans my floor (when it doesn't get tangled in some cord). However, if there was a humanoid robot that can walk around and possibly knock over something or do something unexpected, I don't want that thing in my house. What prevents some hacker to compromise the robot and have it stab me in my sleep? Another example is Alexa/Google Home. Some people love the convenience these in-home services provide, but others find the utility itself a liability: is this thing always listening to me and recording me in my home? The robots can do too much, they have too many functions and abilities, which makes me question the intent of the robot. For robotics to really take off, I think there needs to be a kind of anthropomorphization that needs to happen: the utility of the robot must be high enough that I know that it understands my intention and can respond accordingly; that is to say, that I can have a relationship with my robot.
  • jpm_sd 8y ago
    I 100% disagree with your conclusion. People don't want robot buddies, they want dishwashers. And dishwasher equivalents for other household tasks.
    • Endama 8y ago
      I'm saying that if folks out there want robots to become more human-like, they need to be more human-like in intent as well as function. My original statement is effectively agreeing with you that people don't want robot buddies [right now].
    • soared 8y ago
      People probably made that claim about a ton of other things which turned out false. The best example is music discovery, older generations might've thought "I want to pick my own music, there is no a way a computer could know what I like". But then show them Spotify's discover weekly and they discover 10 songs a week that they live.
      • 8y ago
• elejo 8y ago
  The Roomba 2.0
• moonbug 8y ago
  Usually me with the hoover, doing the bits it missed.
  • stephengillie 8y ago
    This is why you need a general purpose robot - to fill the gap where the specialized robots can't quite make it.
• bluedino 8y ago
  The fact that lawn mowing or carpet cleaning isn’t automated yet makes me think self driving cars are the biggest pipe dream ever.
  • sien 8y ago
    These things are meant to be fab: https://www.husqvarna.com/au/products/robotic-lawn-mowers/ https://www.husqvarna.com/au/products/robotic-lawn-mowers/ But also pricey. A couple of K for one.
    • coob 8y ago
      Where do the clippings go?
      • eindiran 8y ago
        They leave the clippings to fertilize the lawn.
      • EADGBE 8y ago
        From what I've read about it, it cuts (nearly) every day, so the clippings aren't long and are essentially "mulched" without using a specialized mulching blade.
    • TN1ck 8y ago
      My dad just got one of those, but gave it back. You have to install a lot of wire for the lawnmower and even then it made problems (mowed the flowers). They have a weird garden though, so one take this with a grain of salt, but in my eyes the problem is definitely not solved. The hardware is great, but the software is too simple and does not use any CV or ML at all. Maybe I'm thinking too simple, but recognising grass and using SLAM shouldn't be that hard nowadays, so why don't they do it yet?
    • EADGBE 8y ago
      Yeah but they do it in a weird way. You never get that "just cut" look.
• Jagat 8y ago
  Roomba is a great product. I've one that I've used for 4 years thrice a week without any problem. Another one that I've found indispensable is litter-robot. If I pay someone $5 to clear the litter of two cats, I'll have broken even in 100 days. Sci-fi is rife with humanoid robots doing everything, while all customers want is specialized products that do one specific thing well and don't cost a lot. Robotic lawn-mowers - considering there's such a huge market for it especially in the US, I'm surprised no one has come up with a cheap robotic lawn mower yet. There was some rumor about iRobot coming up with their own lawn mower, but that was in 2016 and we've heard nothing of it yet. https://gizmodo.com/we-can-finally-stick-a-name-on-irobots-rumored-lawn-mow-1782893952 https://gizmodo.com/we-can-finally-stick-a-name-on-irobots-r...
  • keiferski 8y ago
    Only speaking personally, but I actually enjoy cutting the grass. It’s a sort of zen-like pattern game. I feel like this is a common sentiment. Sweeping and vacuuming, on the other hand, isn’t nearly as interesting.
    • rhodysurf 8y ago
      I didn't understand this feeling until I owned my own house, but I feel the same now. Mowing the lawn is one of those chores you can lose your mind in and I always feel better when I finish the task.
    • NikolaNovak 8y ago
      It's an extremely personal preference,and people seem to be on the extremes. I know people who absolutely enjoy mowing the lawn, find it relaxing and zen. For myself, every second I mow the lawn (shovel snow, etc) is a moment of my finite life forever lost :< I suspect it _may_ be related to growing up in condos/apartments until a few years ago, and having my residence historically be a "low-maintenance base of operations" from which I do fun/interesting things; and not a "black hole of maintenance and cleanup where I spend all my time & money" that a house now seems to be :P
    • KineticLensman 8y ago
• k__ 8y ago
  We had a Roomba for two years and then replaced it with a cordless vacuum from Dyson. The Roomba never cleaned everything and we had to modify our home quite much to prevent it from getting stuck. So, after the Roomba is before the Roomba, I guess.
  • ngvrnd 8y ago
    the newer ones are much better at avoiding lobster-trap situations. but you are correct.
    • k__ 8y ago
      It always slid under couches or beds that were a few millimeters to narrow in one place, because the floor wasn't evenly flat it often got stuck somewhere below and we had to lift big furnitures
  • Spooky23 8y ago
    I laughed when my dad gave me a refurb Dyson "dustbuster" style vacuum -- it's easily the most useful new cleaning item ever. Robots imo are less interesting than novel applications of lithium ion batteries.
    • ghaff 8y ago
      I’ve been tempted. I have a housekeeper every few weeks. But I do need to clean up every now and then. My old canister vac is such a pain to get out for a small job though that I tend to just avoid whatever needs doing.
      • Spooky23 8y ago
        Do it. It replaces your dustpan, catches bugs, is great for the car, etc. My 6 year old cleans the dinner table with it.
        • k__ 8y ago
• wpietri 8y ago
  The article mentions "fast, cheap and out-of-control" but doesn't point out the excellent documentary by the same name: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119107/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119107/ The 1997 film, directed by master documentarian Errol Morris, covers 4 people: a lion tamer, a topiary gardener, an expert on the naked mole rat, and a then-obscure robot scientist. That robot scientist is Rodney Brooks, founder and former CTO of the Roomba's maker, iRobot. I haven't seen it in years, but I adored the film. I saw it in the theater and had my mind blown: it was clear Errol Morris thought these very different people had something in common, but he never beats you over the head with it, letting you make up your own mind. I liked it so much I went back the next day and the next, something I've never done with a movie before or since. I'll have to watch it again to see how it looks these days.
  • acangiano 8y ago
    Amusingly the animal tamer's last name is Hoover.
  • MrTonyD 8y ago
    I attended some lectures by Rodney Brooks - and I similarly had my mind blown. Over a few lectures he covered a wide variety of research, much of it for 3-letter organizations and it included his development of "scurrying" robots with multiple sensors and multiple actuators. Of course, much of it was subsumption architecture - still an interesting topic. He also talked about how he was trying to find a use for his robotic prototypes, and was creating a company to release a product. (So I guess this is yet another case of government investments resulting directly in privatized profit. Pretty typical - though many seem to want to deny it.)
    • ghaff 8y ago
      > (So I guess this is yet another case of government investments resulting directly in privatized profit. Pretty typical - though many seem to want to deny it.) You mean, like the Internet? I thought that was one of the justifications for government-funded research. Long-term research that jumpstarts shorter-term private development and productization.
• bredren 8y ago
  This article missed an artful nod to Robert A. Heinlen's "The Door into Summer." This terrific novel not only heavily features the rise and use of home-robots, but has a bunch of cat stuff in it to-boot. I give this a hearty recommend for imaginative cat companion-having, home-robot enthusiasts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Door_into_Summer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Door_into_Summer
• Johnny555 8y ago
  I think there's still some innovation remaining for the robot vacuum. Like a robot vacuum that can handle stairs. The Roomba does a pretty decent job on a single-level, but has to be manually carried up/down stairs and someone still has to vacuum the stairs themselves. And one that can automatically detect when it's ingested a wire would be nice, I've lost 2 USB cables to our Roomba so far. And this guy would like his robot vacuum to detect when it's run over soft, pliable waste before it spreads it throughout the house: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/08/15/pooptastrophe-man-details-night-his-roomba-ran-over-dog-poop/88667704/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/08/15/po...
  • nkrisc 8y ago
    I was considering a Roomba but after reading this I've decided it's simply not an option because I own cats, and this is not a risk I'm willing to take.
    • Johnny555 8y ago
      If your cats regularly (or even irregularly) poop on the floor, then yeah, I wouldn't risk it. If it only happens in one area of the house, then you can set up a beacon to keep the roomba away. It hasn't been a problem with our dogs.
      • nkrisc 8y ago
        They've pooped on the floor exactly once during a time when there was a lot of change and one of them was stressed out. I'm actually more concerned about regular old vomit or a hairball than poop, but even the possibility of cat poop spread all over is enough to turn me off to it.
    • robotron 8y ago
      I had three cats and an older refurb Roomba and it worked fine. One was a longhair and they all shed quite a bit.
  • jotux 8y ago
• smogcutter 8y ago
  The scale of effort and investment going into freeing us of the burden of caring for the elderly and disabled is astounding.
• post_break 8y ago
  I'd love a roomba that knows to not smear cat vomit/shit. That's the only reason I don't have one.
• nkozyra 8y ago
  To me, food preparation is the big void in automation. A few companies are trying it here and there, but being able to prepare a decent-tasting meal (even if you have to do the cleaning yourself) would change some lives dramatically. These aren't things that necessarily require advanced AI or sensors or anything; the basic elements of cooking are relatively simple. The real issue is the vast diversity of cooking/compilation methods. In other words, automating meals could be done, but automating all meals would require something monumental. But consider simple baked meals, which comprise thousands of recipes. There are people in the space, but I think a commercial grade Cookbot is a holy grail for home automation.
  • sien 8y ago
    Time use studies support what you're saying: https://www.bls.gov/tus/charts/household.htm https://www.bls.gov/tus/charts/household.htm The most time consuming activity in households is food preparation. The other way that cookbots can be addressed is by preparing food in kitchens and then shipping it out at very low cost. Autonomous vehicles are ideal for that. The food can then either be prepared by people or robots in commercial kitchens.
  • bobthepanda 8y ago
    Do you need a robot for that, or an appliance? All these sous vide startups and the Instant Pot have come a long way towards automating their respective niches. At this point, the only thing that you could really automate is stirring a pot. Everything else is either too complicated or too subjective (how rare a steak should be, etc.)
  • gnulinux 8y ago
    I LOVE cooking, there is no way to express how much I love it. But strangely this love also has the implication that I hate when I need to cook fast. Sometimes I hang out a lot in the gym or work and come home around 9-10pm. At that point cooking for an hour is not option as it's almost bed time, so I cook fast. I hate this, and I just want ready food (but I never eat out as a principle). I searched into this, tried to find startups that can automate my food. I'd be willing to pay a lot of money if a robot made my food exactly the way I want it, and then I can cook long meals 3 to 5 times a week. But unfortunately, the only relevant products are liquid food. There are some startups, such as Soylent, who claim their product has complete nutritional value. So you just shake their powder in water and be done with dinner in 2 minutes. I personally thought this is a distraction from the problem, but I honestly don't know how could we automate food.
• sgt101 8y ago
  Odd that they didn't ask Rodney Brookes!
• oh_sigh 8y ago
  How about a better Roomba? One that can handle obstacles and cables, intelligently avoid dog poop, can always find its way back to home base for a charge, etc.
• GlenTheMachine 8y ago
  Full dosclosure: I am a roboticist. I've been in the field professionally for about thirty years. I'm really skeptical that there is anything “after the roomba”. Or, to be more specific, I'm skeptical that technology used in the home will look anything like a robot, a self-contained intelligent machine that moves around and cleans/folds laundry/does dishes. Ther are a couple of reasons for this. This first is that these problems are extremely hard to solve. And this is not true just in terms of algorithms, but also in terms of hardware. A humanoid robot is as complex as, if not more complex than, an automobile. Currently, humanoid robots go for $500,000 a pop. Even after economies of scale it's hard for me to imagine that getting below $50,000 — much less $5,000, which is probably the price range that makes them viable as anything other than a novelty for wealthy people. Which brings up the second point. One thing I have learned the hard way in robotics is that you have to understand precisely what your competition is and how much money that competition requires to solve the problem. In the case of an in-home robot, for most of us the competition is our own labor or that of our significant others/kids/housemates. But we are not the early adopters of this technology. Wealthy people are. For wealthy people, the competition is either a live-in assistant or a contract cleaning service. Contract cleaning services pay their workers approximately minimum wage. Minimum wage is a very difficult price target for a robot to meet. And the third issue is that to first approximation these problems are already solved. And not by what we would consider a robot, but by appliances. My grandmother, for most of her life, kept house without elecricity, and hence without a dishwasher, vacuum, or dryer. These appliances dramatically reduced the effort it takes to keep house, without being robots. I strongly suspect that any cost-efficient solution to folding clothes or taking dirty dishes from the sink and turning them into clean dishes in a cupboard will resemble an appliance. If you want your dishes cleaned robotically, then you don't put a robot in the kitchen. You turn the kitchen into a robot.
  • russdill 8y ago
    What if I told you that these robots were assembled almost entirely by other robots? And that their raw materials were mined by other robots?
    • GlenTheMachine 8y ago
• kpil 8y ago
  Before dreaming on, why not make a Roomba that actually works. I have an older Roomba and a newer BotVac, and the BotVac is slightly more clever, but it's about 10% chance that I won't find it bleeping helplessly on some new minor obstruction that it found. It's impossible to have a house where there are absolutely no cables, dropped socks, dropped toys, rugs, furniture with "tank stopper" properties, curtains that are slightly too low, etc, etc. When my vacuum cleaner can untangle itself, I will pay silly money for something that takes care of my laundry. After that, something that loads, unloads and sorts my dishwasher would be nice, but nothing comes close to pairing socks...
  • smortaz 8y ago
    On that last bit - pairing socks: finally threw out 50+ multi-colored pairs and bought 20 in just two colors. All get dumped into one bin after drying. Three blind pulls guarantees a matched pair. Nice timesaver.
    • misterprime 8y ago
      Wait until they start fading at different rates...
      • yurishimo 8y ago
        I personally gave up on this years ago. These days I find myself wearing flip-flops most days, but when I wear shoes, I grab two socks and don't care if they even match. Naturally, my sock purchases have tended towards only black in my preferred style, but for almost two years there was a good chance the socks I wore didn't match at all. 99% of the time people never noticed or cared enough to comment, and the 1% who did made it a fun conversation piece.
      • YokoZar 8y ago
        You can solve the uneven wear problem by not replacing them in the bin until the bin is empty. The laziest way to do this is to not launder your socks until you run out.
• bobosha 8y ago
  I think the "all-or-nothing" mind might have something to do with it. Obviously tech has a long way to go to have a replacement house maid bot. But there are several bridge applications: e.g. * a bot that just scrubs dishes and places into a dishwasher * a stairbot that lugs heavy items up & down stairs * a bot that separates recyclables from your trash These are feasible with current tech IMHO.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• Jhsto 8y ago
  Having hacked on Roombas[0], one thing which dissatisfies me is open hardware access. That is, let advanced users SSH into the robots and let them read the sensor data and control the robot. Once you have that you could repurpose the robot for your own needs, which for me in [0] was basic object detection (trying to find something resembling human legs in this case). This could be used for either counting people in the room or to give spatial data information for other use-cases. As demonstrated in my later YouTube video[1] the floorplans created with the vacuum cleaner laser can be used to position IoT devices for your own augmented reality stuff, that is, for real-time position tracking in relation to the room in which the robot is standing in, or just simply calibrating a gyroscope of another device which then uses the pre-made floorplans. Anyhow, one thing which I have been thinking is that given a smart home, do people rather want to talk to an abstract thing like an Alexa, or will they want to have a physical thing to which they talk to, like the vacuum cleaner. I imagine the interaction is a bit different regarding whether you just command Alexa to turn things off, rather than have a vacuum cleaner, which you can call to come to you, and still respond similarly to Alexa. With kids, I guess they'd essentially prefer vacuum cleaners, albeit I haven't really tested their reaction because the toddlers I know do not speak English for which the speech recognition stuff is mature. My peers do not expect my vacuum cleaner to either talk or listen, which it can do both, so it seems like it should also roam the room around (without cleaning objective) for others to interact with it. Given the time and artistic freedom, I'd probably buy plenty of vacuum cleaners and have them scan the campus corridors for stationary people to talk to, to essentially just see what people talk back to the robots. Sorry if the text is incomprehensible, it is quite late. [0]: https://youtu.be/mlAEZZ5fPbo https://youtu.be/mlAEZZ5fPbo [1]: https://youtu.be/OTlOULeNUUo https://youtu.be/OTlOULeNUUo
  • craftyguy 8y ago
    The botvacs (at least my D85) has a uart interface, and a published API[1] that allows you to control and read back all sorts of information, including raw data from the lidar. 1. https://www.neatorobotics.com/resources/programmersmanual_20140305.pdf https://www.neatorobotics.com/resources/programmersmanual_20... Edit: damn, they moved the document, or took it down altogether :(
• thomk 8y ago
  Easy: a Roomba that does not smear pet feces. I would happily spend double the amount of todays best Roomba if they could invent one that would simply stop when it found pet poop. After breaking 3 robots over my knee for covering my floor in pet poo, I decided to simply not vacuum. :D
  • mrep 8y ago
    I've heard about that problem so I only run mine while I'm home. Why don't you do that?
• zygotic12 8y ago
  A Roomba that won't spread your pets sick and poo all over the floor? (apologies this is a long thread and I'm sure someone has this already).
  • neumann 8y ago
    hah. that would be awesome.
• JaRail 8y ago
  I'd really like a robot capable of creating standard meals. If something could cook up a small variety of basic dinners with customizations, or make a sandwich, I'd be really pleased. I imagine for a decently sized family, also having it handle ordering food delivery of necessary ingredients as they start to run low would be awesome.
  • bodas 8y ago
    I think this is better implemented industrially. It's easier to make a robot that can deliver food (made in a factory), than it is to make a robot that can cook a variety of meals from raw ingredients. Both are super difficult problems but delivery robots are at a more advanced stage. Instead of sandwich making robots we are more likely to see sandwich delivery robots rolling around the neighborhood, waiting for someone to summon them.
    • minitoar 8y ago
      obligatory http://tacocopter.com/ http://tacocopter.com/
• resters 8y ago
  We just have to look harder for them. "self driving" cars are effectively cars with a robotic driver. They aren't here yet but they are on the horizon. Arguably, the car itself is a robot. "Hey robot, go pick up soandso at the airport" or "hey robot please drop off these packages at the UPS store", etc. Robotic locks "Alexa, lock the front door". AR technologies on phones is straight out of sci fi, but in sci fi it would have been glasses or goggles offered by a humanoid robot... but now nearly everyone's phone can do it. The Roomba is a great example of a robot that required a significant redefinition of the "problem" of vacuuming. A normal vacuum picks up some dirt, a Dyson will pick up significantly more dirt. A Roomba barely picks up any. The secret is that the Roomba goes all over the floor many times and eventually does a job comparable to a standard vacuum, but with no human labor required. The task is also stretched in time, the Roomba takes 5x or 10x longer than a human would take to do the same job, but it's OK because it can do the work when nobody is home to be annoyed by the noise. Industrial automation is significantly enhanced by robotics, and it does a good enough job that we just buy the resulting products at the store, not knowing or caring how they were made. Some robots that could be made with existing tech that would save lives would be: - crossing guard robots that scoot out into the intersection to create a physical barrier before pedestrians begin to cross, then quickly scoot back to allow cars once the light changes. - yoga robots that stretch and massage the muscles of humans to gently improve mobility and strength. - sex robots create companionship for those who have difficulty with human companionship. - tiny pest control robots will detect and help exterminate rodent and insect infestations, preventing disease. - guardian robots will accompany elderly people, always ready to catch them if they fall and to call for help if needed. Similar units will accompany children while they walk to school or go about their communities unattended by adults.
• tokyodude 8y ago
  I know it's a 1000x harder but I'd pay for a dusting roomba that climb all the hard surfaces in my house and removed the dust. Of course apparently roombas can't even handle the floor so I have no hope there will be shelf crawling min roombas anytime soon.
  • tk75x 8y ago
    There exist remote control cars that are light enough to stick to the wall with a little suction. Add brushes, a filter, dust storage, and automation and there's your solution.
• imoverclocked 8y ago
  Am I the only one who considers a dishwasher and a vacuum cleaner to be a very simple robot? It seems like robot == machine +/- software. From that standpoint, we have had increasingly complex robots in our homes for a long time now.
  • sgillen 8y ago
    Yeah I think people want their “robots” to be able to move around. I guess the washing machine is just that, a machine.
• picsao 8y ago
  I think a true optimum requires Something like the Mc Donald's dancing lessons tailored to the daily routines
• TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  What comes after the Roomba? Electric cooktops with built in timers. Why, oh why! does nobody build electric cooktops with built in timers?! At least, I haven't been able to find one here in Australia at a reasonable price. I think I saw some huge six zone one with touch controls that had it, but it was $6,9999.
  • tralarpa 8y ago
    Something like this? https://www.bosch-home.com.au/productlist/cooking-baking/cooktops/ceramic-cooktops https://www.bosch-home.com.au/productlist/cooking-baking/coo...
    • TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
      Yes! But it’s $2,000 and won’t fit in the space I have. Will have to have a closer look when I get home, see if there’s a 60cm model with timers. But yeah thanks, I’ve tried looking a few times online. Admittedly haven’t been in to a store to ask.
• tralarpa 8y ago
  A bit off-topic, but as somebody living in Europe, I found it interesting to discover from the comments here that lawn mower robots are not popular in the US. Some of the readers don't even seem to know they exist. What is the reason for this? I know that estates are bigger in the US than in Europe on average, but there must be still millions of families with lawns smaller than 10,000 sqft? (which is the maximum lawn size for most robots below $1500) (Of course, there could be some bias here; many HN readers probably live in big cities)
• pX0r 8y ago
  Roomba for a car-wash.
• calewis 8y ago
  The Roomba is the single worst tech product I've ever purchased, and I've brought a lot of junk. So much more hassle than running the hoover round a few times a week. I wonder what thier repeat purchase rate is? I suspect it's not that significant beyond a few die hards.