Fun With Robots: Your Vacuum Can Do More Than You Expect

One of our readers pointed a fun video (see Video 1 below) where a baby is gently swung by an iRobot Roomba. It turns out that there are many other videos where Roomba is used for purposes unplanned by iRobot.

Video 1: Baby over Roomba

In Video 2, the Roomba is used to carry cats around while cleaning the floor. Pets seem to enjoy this means of transportation.

Video 2: Cat over Roomba

Some other creative roboticists goes further and make hardware evolutions to their vacuum robot. Video 3 shows a Roomba turned into a toy tank by implanting an air soft gun on top of it. The gun can be remotely shot, so we get an RC military toy vehicle.

Video 3: Roomba turned into a toy tank

On the multi-robots systems side, some folks built: Roomba Pacman shown in Video 4. The physical version of the famous pacman game relies on multiple cameras attached to the ceiling to cover all the arena. Images are processed based on the OpenCV fee image processing library to track the robots. From the video, we can see that the project uses one Roomba Red and four Roomba Create.

Video 4: Roomba Pacman

Each robot carries a Hagisonic Stargazer indoor positioning system which computes the robots relative position and orientation. Roombas were also extended with an alix3d2 embedded PC board for control and wifi communication as shown on Picture 1.

Picture 1: Roomba Create used in the Roomba Pacman project

We leave you with Video 5 made for fun with our kids. We invented a short story where the main character is Roomdizer a hybrid of Roomba and Grendizer.

Video 5: Roomba + Grendizer = Roomdizer