The company which designed facial recognition and location awareness systems for some of the best known consumer robotics in history, including the now-departed Sony AIBO robot dog and WowWee’s line of toy robots, introduced their competitor for the robotic cleaning market at CES 2010. Evolution Robotics presented their cleaning robot named Mint which differs from… »
After writing about E-Cleaner EC01 and Neato XV-11 we’re going to write about robotic vacuum cleaner(s) from LG Electronics. After the big failure of their too expensive (yet not more functional) first version of RoboKing, they decided to develop a better and cheaper robot that could compete with Roomba. Although the new RoboKing isn’t available… »
In our last article we started a mini-series named “Is Roomba’s throne at risk?” where we wrote about AGAiT Technology E-Cleaner EC01. Neato Robotics, a Silicon Valley startup, is pioneering new products to free people from household chores, introduced a new home robot vacuum cleaner that raises the bar for automated floor cleaning. The Neato… »
There were many contenders who wanted to take iRobot’s throne of small cleaning robots. We wrote about Panasonic’s attempt to introduce floor scrubbing robots, but they aimed to a different part of the market. Nowadays, there is a growing number of rivals pretending on iRobot’s most popular vacuuming robot Roomba. In this article and a… »
Researchers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., are developing a transparent coating that prevents dirt and even bacteria from sticking in the same way a lotus plant sheds water. The research begun through collaboration of Northrop Grumman Electronics Systems, Linthicum, Md., and nGimat Corporation, Atlanta, Ga. Although a lotus leaf appears smooth,… »
A group of European companies and universities have collaborated to produce a series of multifunctional robots for urban hygiene tasks. With abilities ranging from door-to-door garbage pickup and transportation, to automated street cleaning, the DustBot robots recently demonstrated their skills at a station in the town of Atxuri, Portugal. During the presentation the team demonstrated… »
Humans have always wondered how water beads roll off flowers, as well off caterpillars and some other insects, and how insects like water striders are able to walk on water. It’s a property called super hydrophobia. Self-cleaning counter tops, fabrics, walls, even micro-robots that can walk on water – all those things and more could… »
A big majority of us actually keep our living quarters more or less clean. Roomba is a small floor vacuuming robot from iRobot which was introduced in 2002 and since then had several revisions and changes. The unit is a disc, 34cm in diameter and less than 9cm high. A large contact-sensing bumper is mounted… »
