Servo - July 2008

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.