6 ms·
Revisiting the original Roomba and its simple architecture
- ZiiS 9mo agoThe modern vSLAM robots with mops and swing brushes for edges may seem ridiculously complex, but they do work well and a much cheaper than the original Roombas. I think this more proved that software is easier than hardware. (i.e. complex vSLAM is cheaper than a bigger battery needed for less optimal routing)
- drpixie 9mo ago> software is easier than hardware Software is certainly easier to replicate that hardware, 1M copies cost almost exactly the same as 1 copy :)
- lostlogin 9mo agoRisking this turning into some sort of ‘Wired Top 5’, but what is the go-to robot vacuum? My Roomba has become a hatefully little chaos monkey. The house small and has wooden floors, so it shouldn’t be too tough.
- JamesSwift 9mo agoJust check out Vacuum Wars on YouTube to find the best based on your own criteria
- shawabawa3 9mo agoI'm a fan of the roborock S8 (now the S10 i guess) It's a vacuum + mop combo which imo is way better for hard floors
- HPsquared 9mo agoDoes it choose based on the surface, or just let both run all the time? (Mop on carpet doesn't sound ideal)
- baby_souffle 9mo agoThey have an ultrasonic sensor to measure the type of floor and will not pump water when carpet is detected
- imp0cat 9mo agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz6U9QkXn5I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz6U9QkXn5I Check this for a short overview of the available robovac mop technologies - modern roller mop equipped units have ultrasonic carpet sensors and will actually cover the entire mop to avoid getting carpets wet.
- Nihilartikel 9mo agoSeconding Roborock - we have a mid range one and it's effective and a huge step up in smartness from my old Samsung. I love being able to dispatch it to one or two different rooms and walk away knowing that it will get the job done. As a bonus, there are open source drop in replacements for the mfg's cloud service so you can self host your floor maps and stats, if that's your jam. (this isn't roborock exclusive though).
- forbiddenlake 9mo agoCan you link them? It's not valetudo is it?
- Nihilartikel 9mo agoValetudo is what I was referring to. For the vacuum, it's the Roborock Q5+ back from 2023. Not top of the line, but it works well on our mixed hardood+ rug floors.
- baby_souffle 9mo agoAnything valetudo supports is a good choice. Roborock has a semi official API that you can use to get ok levelers of integration with home assistant but valetudo is the gold standard.
- qazxcvbnmlp 9mo agoI think this was the missing piece from the article. The simple behaviors enabled interest in a market, but at the end of the day, the original Roomba didn't work well. It's cool to romanticize the simple behaviors, but like they miss things.
- fsh 9mo agoiRobot refused to incorporate LIDAR scanners, instead relying on some janky computer vision approach. Robots from Roborock and friends know their position with cm-accuracy at all times, whereas Roombas only have some vibe about which part of the building they are in. This makes them much less efficient at route planning and less reliable at adhering to exclusion zones.
- ramon156 9mo agoBeen meaning to try something like https://valetudo.cloud/ https://valetudo.cloud/ on my iRobot but I haven't checked out how hard it is.
- jasondjk 9mo agoIt’s not exactly easy but it is do-able if you have a compliant vacuum, order a pcb adapter and can boot a laptop into a recent Debian os to flash the firmware. Be careful what you say on the telegram group (I was banned for trying to buy a pcb instead of solder one).
- zero0529 9mo agoI wasn’t aware that it was possible on iRobot machines
- cuu508 9mo agoThere are no iRobot models in the Valetudo supported robots list.
- Semaphor 9mo agoI wish my Xiaomi X20+ was supported. I knew it wasn’t when I bought it, but the price/capability alignment made me go with a dumb "smart" vacuum. There hasn’t been an update in supported robots in almost 2 years, so I’m still holding out hope it will eventually be added when Dennis Giese gets bored and starts looking into stuff again ;)
- distances 9mo ago
- itopaloglu83 9mo agoIt’s not related to the engineering side of things, but the Roomba subreddit would ban people for mentioning anything negative about the product, such a great way to keep your product “successful”.
- GardenLetter27 9mo agoThe entirety of Reddit is like that.
- expedition32 9mo agoDaily reminder companies have social media teams.
- RealityVoid 9mo agoThe entire internet is astroturfed and manipulated and full of bots and influence campaigns. Here included. Really not what I hoped it would turn into.
- Forgeties79 9mo agoIt happens here I’m sure but, and maybe this I naive of me, I do not think we are seeing the organized, funded efforts like they see on Reddit. It’s usually someone self promoting here in my experience. I’m sure it’s happened but idk, it just doesn’t seem like seem as coordinated and large scale. If it is well done y’all, you’re hiding well! My experience with HN is people generally prefer to dog pile onto whatever was mentioned, say it is the worst option, then bicker with each other about all the solutions being proposed. I say bicker, but those threads can be great sources of info.
- dec0dedab0de 9mo agoi have never seen a subreddit about something that didn’t turn into mostly hating that thing.
- pilingual 9mo agoRoomba was originally written in Lisp. In the pandemic I bought the cheapest one, and it worked very well. It had a handle so I could pick it up, responsive buttons, and intuitive tones. A few years later I bought one that automatically suctioned debris into a home base. That one had no handle, required reset frequently, and had tones that made you guess which Japanese train station it just arrived at. Something went wrong at that company, and I don't think competition is an excuse.
- driscoll42 9mo agoWhen Roomba thought it was about to be acquired by Amazon, it did lay off 10% of its staff - https://www.therobotreport.com/irobot-laying-off-10-of-staff/ https://www.therobotreport.com/irobot-laying-off-10-of-staff.... and after the deal was canceled, it was disclosed that they had reduced R&D and focused on margin improvements, and there was some brain drain as people left Roomba as it was in a 18 month limbo - https://www.verdict.co.uk/irobot-to-cut-over-a-third-of-its-workforce-as-amazon-deal-implodes/ https://www.verdict.co.uk/irobot-to-cut-over-a-third-of-its-.... And of course all this self inflicted pain only hurt them doubly as the Amazon deal fell through. If they had acted as if they weren't going to be acquired they might be fine, but they tried to maximize the shareholder revenue.
- HPsquared 9mo agoPoor risk management!
- rwmj 9mo agoI wonder if Amazon did that deliberately. Back in the day (about 2002) I was working at an education software company which was trying to get itself acquired by Microsoft. MSFT came in and told us our software didn't conform to all these "standards" in the educational software space. Standards which, coincidentally, Microsoft themselves had written. These pseudo-standards did absolutely nothing to help our customers, and were pure bureaucracy and very very complicated to implement. I'd recently read Charles Ferguson's book about how his company was acquired by MSFT, and recognized this part of their standard operating procedure, along with extreme and invasive due diligence where they spend a lot of time working out if you're stupid/pliable enough to jump through these hoops while buying themselves time to work out if they can clone your product. I tried to warn management (yes, really - even bought them copies of the book) but naturally no one would listen, and reading a book was too much like hard work. At some point MSFT simply ceased returning management's calls, and rolled out a similar product a while later. The company imploded not long after, not for this reason in particular, but it was part of a general pattern of incompetence and mismanagement.
- gugagore 9mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture
- cobbzilla 9mo agoOne of the stated disadvantages was “the difficulty of designing adaptable action selection through highly distributed system of inhibition and suppression” I can’t help but wonder how well a token-based AI could iteratively tune (or develop) a subsumption-based AI.
- alnwlsn 9mo agoI was a young kid when these came out. I remember being in a store that had one running around as a demo, bumping aimlessly around under shelves and off shopper's feet. With amusement, I watched it bump off a table leg, and rotate perfectly into position to drive through the open front door, then slowly drive forwards out of the store, never to be seen again. Not long after that is when I started reading hardware hacking stuff. The early Roombas were extremely hackable - each one had a serial port connector under a cover and you could connect it to a computer and drive them around. It was the pre-Raspberry Pi days; I remember people attaching a router or the lightest netbook they could find for some sort of wifi remote control. I was too young to ever get to play with one, but I did get to take a broken one apart once. Some highlights were the planetary gearbox contained inside the wheel hubs, and a cam on the rear caster which would trigger an optical limit switch once per rotation so it could estimate distance traveled.
- WorldMaker 9mo agoThat original half-black/half-white caster for very simple/cheap optical limits was something of a known off-the-shelf approach. You'd often use them in various Lego Robotics environments a decade or two before the Roomba. It's easy to agree with the article here that the off-the-shelf simplicity of the early Roomba was a virtue. I appreciated that sense that you could look at a lot of the parts and guess what they were for or how the operated from the software side. That caster was one of those for "oh, yeah, that's probably for simple distance estimations".
- quadrature 9mo agoSlightly offtopic but i feel like someone around here might be able to help. I've been learning how to do SLAM with LIDAR data and I was curious what algorithms robot vacuums use. I'm currently implementing a particle filter and will also try out EKF.
- martythemaniak 9mo agoI've been playing around with SLAM using a depth camera, so I can't really tell you about LIDAR specifically, but I'd suggest doing some Deep Researches on the topic to get you a good lay of the land. During my searches for example, I came across this great compilation of visual SLAM projects: https://github.com/VSLAM-LAB/VSLAM-LAB https://github.com/VSLAM-LAB/VSLAM-LAB Unless you're a massive operation, you're probably just using an existing academic project, many of which handle a variety of inputs (depth, 2D lidar, 3D lidar etc), ie RTABMAP (what I started with), ORB-SLAM, nVidia Issac ROS SLAM (if you're on Jetson) etc. AMCL is an old-school algorithm for localization with 2D data - I tried it by taking a fake 2D scan from the depth camera and it was pretty terrible, so currently I'm trying to get visual-only SLAM working well enough for me because I don't want to spend $1k on a decent 3D lidar.
- quadrature 9mo ago> but I'd suggest doing some Deep Researches on the topic to get you a good lay of the land thanks for the resources !. I've been trying to get a wide view by looking at different algorithms, but I was curious what was actually used in production systems especially for consumer products. RTABMAP and Cartographer came up in my searches, will definitely give these a closer look to understand how they work. Right now im starting off with filter based approaches like Particle filter and Kalman filter, but i'd also like to understand how the graph based approaches work.
- lightcrafter 9mo agoLead mechanical engineer of the original Roomba here. The article is good on the behavior based algorithmic approach, but equal weight should be given to both the clever sensor design, and the extremely unusual 'passive feedback' cleaning head system the team came up with. The bump sensor, cliff detection, and wall detection were all implemented with plain IR LED emitter/receiver pairs, and very carefully shaped plastic enclosures so that the sensors provided a binary signal (floor vs. cliff, wall present/absent, etc.) that would hold up for the millions of cycles the machines racked up. This 'filtering in the sensor' simplified the inputs to the 8 bit 8051 microcontroller, and lowered the cost to a couple of cents for each detector. The cleaning head used the torque of the brush motor to actively control the height of the cleaning head as the machine moved from carpet to hard floors and back. That's the 'core trick' that let the Roomba clean well on multiple surfaces with about 15 watts of brush power. Details in the now-expired patent -- https://patents.google.com/patent/US6883201B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US6883201B2/en. Dave Nugent came up with the original torque lift idea, and then we worked it into the 'floating pulley' approach used in the final design. It seems obvious now, but at the time this was a radically different approach to mobile cleaning. Everyone else (Electrolux, Karcher, etc.) tried to make a miniature vacuum, but that burned too much power for a mobile system. Joe Jones (project originator and team physicist) wrote a book about the original team and our development process that I recommend: https://dancingwithroomba.com/ https://dancingwithroomba.com/ Minor tech notes: Phil Mass did the original programming on the first generation Roomba in C on the aforementioned Winbond 8051 microcontroller. I think it had 256 bytes (!!!) of RAM and 4K of ROM. The code was burned into the chip at its creation (no onboard flash!) so it had to be right the first time. For the 2nd generation system they ported the behavior code to the internal LISP dialect in use at iRobot. It was a wild ride. I'm both proud of what we did, and dismayed (but not surprised) at what happened afterwards.
- digdugdirk 9mo agoThanks for the commentary! I love hearing stories about the team members behind the scenes, and the clever innovations that make things work. Cool stuff!
- dgroshev 9mo agoThe original Roombas were also a joy to repair. I had one for a decade, and the only thing that eventually broke was the IR sensor at the top, which left the robot unable to park. I bought a replacement, opened the robot up, and it wasn't just easy to work on, it even had captive nuts everywhere! Thank you for your work on the roombas, they were an incredible feat of consumer product engineering.
- chews 9mo agoIt was remarkably easy to hack, the brilliant human Tod Kurt (todbot) did amazing work hacking them and documenting how to do it. Using his insights, I wrote a little bluetooth library/app for the Mac that would forward movement commands from a Wii remote to a hacked on bluetooth serial adapter connected to the Roomba... WSJ even did a piece on it. https://archive.ph/A6aTlI https://archive.ph/A6aTlI The day after Christmas I was front-page of Digg, Gizmodo, and Slashdot at the same time :-)