Servo - April 2009

couldn’t possibly achieve,” Dyson explained.

FIGURE 8.

truly autonomous machine, rather than a glorified carpet sweeper. Propulsion and battery life will be key, and we’re getting closer,” Dyson commented. He intends to bring out a superior robot vacuum cleaner very soon.

His reasoning for scrapping the original model was its high price, poor battery performance, and suction not up to his company’s high standards. Dyson was satisfied with the machine’s sensor/microcontroller system and the required programming, but his ‘Dual Cyclone’ vacuum system was difficult to implement in such a small device. “An automatic vacuum cleaner must clean as well as the best mains powered vacuum cleaner and with the sort of methodical coverage a human being

German Robotics

KUKA Roboter, based in Augsburg, Germany is another robot company that has installations in most of the industrialized countries of the world. With a line of over 100 models,

mostly painted orange (is this a European robot color tradition?), this German company began operations in 1989 and entered the US market in 1995.

One of their most unique products is the Robocoaster — a large robot arm with one or two seats attached, acting as an amusement park ride. Figure 8 shows two people experiencing the ride at a robot exhibition.

Germany has not been left out of the consumer robot market. The German designed and built Kärcher RC3000 Robocleaner is a pretty good robot vacuum. It basically operates much the same as the other popular brands. It does, however, have one unique feature: It automatically takes its collected dirt and dust back to the

combination base station/charger unit as seen in Figure 9 and deposits it, recharges itself, and heads back out to clean another room. Unlike some of the other top end robot vacuums, the Kärcher does not use room mapping, relying instead on the random cleaning approach. Kärcher has been around for years and has built the popular KMR 1200 commercial road sweeper that they are now looking to make entirely autonomous. Priced at an average of $1,500, the RC3000 is quite a bit more expensive than the Roomba but does offer some attractive features. It has not been as popular as the Trilobite here in the US but seems to be selling quite well in the UK and the rest of Europe.

Robotics

Development is Shared in Most European Countries

FIGURE 9.

Europe has long been a leader in robotics technology. Reis Robotics in Obernburg, Germany, the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation in Stuttgart, Germany, the European Robotics Association based in Brussels, Belgium, the LIRA-Lab at the University of Genova, Italy, and the TKK Automation Technology Laboratory at the University of Finland in Helsinki are just a few of the many world-class companies, organizations, and universities in Europe that have made world news lately in the field of robotics.

NASA is not the only space agency developing lunar and planetary rover technology. The European Space Agency (ESA) has been interested in studying the lunar craters at the Moon’s poles, long thought to hold deposits of frozen water. Not only is this necessary for lunar-based astronauts to drink, it is also an important source of hydrogen and oxygen for fuel and breathing. Lunar orbiters have detected water vapor emissions but rovers are the key to determining just how much ice is available.