CES 2008 Robot Roundup
the number of times you have to go up and down the
ladder. They had a nice little demo with a piece of roof, a
gutter mounted to it that was filled with plastic leaves, and
they would drive the Looj down it and it would throw the
leaves all over the aisle in front of their booth (Photo 6). It
was great fun to see it go.
After asking many questions, I came up with all the
things it cannot do, to dispel any myth making. It cannot
climb the downspout, you cannot just throw it up on the
roof and let it do the rest, it cannot go around the corners
in your gutters, it is not compatible with ancient gutters,
with weird dimensions, and it won’t do the job all by itself
while you sit down on your lawn with a glass of lemonade.
What it can do, it does very well, and is quite amazing. Its
paddle is capable of blasting through all kinds of gunk in
your gutters, like pine needles, twigs, and sludge. If your
gutters are a standard 2-1/4” size, it is capable of driving
underneath the straps that hold the gutter to the house,
so you can clean long sections. If your house was perfectly
square, you would only need to ascend and descend the
ladder four times, thus minimizing your risk of life and limb
by falling off the ladder. It is certainly better than the old
method of climbing up there with gloves and a plastic
scoop, and at only $99 for the base unit, it is cheaper than
most lawn and garden appliances.
The iRobot Roomba 500 Series (Photo 7) was there,
driving around a little test carpet that anyone could scatter
all kinds of debris on, and it would happily slurp it up. Every
time I see a new version of the Roomba I think, okay, what
now, seen this before, ho-hum. However, this one has some
great new features that would make me upgrade. It has
anti-tangle technology, that detects if it sucked up a carpet
fringe or an electrical cord, and automatically backs it out
of the beater-brush before continuing along and restarting
to clean. It has upgraded bump switches which give it a
lighter touch to keep it from scuffing the baseboard or
furniture. Also, it has a new Virtual Wall, called a
Lighthouse, that the robot interacts
with to allow it to be contained to one
room until the room is clean, which
then allows it to move onto the next
room and so on, and so on. So, one
robot can clean multiple rooms, and
know when it has completed them all.
At $349, it is in line with the pricing
of previous Roomba robots, and offers
significant improvements without a
significant increase in price.
Roboware ( www.roboware.
com.hk) had a booth in the Tech
Zone, where they were showing off an
impressive looking, three wheeled,
holonomic drive humanoid named E3
(Photo 8). I guess 2008 is the year for
holonomic drive humanoids?!?!
Roboware was founded by Mike Kim,
who previously was one of the
researches on the Canadarm space
Photo 7
robot on ISS, was part of the Hubble Telescope rescue
project, and has contributed to some Wow Wee projects
such as RSMedia, Elvis, and RSG products. According to
Mike, E3 stands for Education, Entertainment, and Emotion,
which makes it a platform much like a video game. E3 can
express its emotion through motions (head, arms, body,
wheel), light, and multi-media with customized content.
It has five login modes: Baby, Teen, House-Keeper, Single,
and Silver. Each mode has its own unique and updatable
personality according to the user’s age. E3 has WiFi built in
so it can be controlled remotely via the Internet and
through its ad-hoc networking capabilities can be voice
controlled, or stream or playback live video. It is even
capable of doing Sykpe teleconferencing. E3 has a big 5”
LCD mounted in his chest and runs Windows Mobile
edition, so he can do many PDA-type functions, as well.
The retail price range of E3 will be between $1,500-$2,000
and he will be available in the US around November of
this year.
Robotis ( www.robotis.com) returned to CES again this
Photo 8
Photo 9
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