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#437683 iRobot Remembers That Robots Are ...
iRobot has released several new robots over the last few years, including the i7 and s9 vacuums. Both of these models are very fancy and very capable, packed with innovative and useful features that we’ve been impressed by. They’re both also quite expensive—with dirt docks included, you’re looking at US $800 for the i7+, and a whopping $1,100 for the s9+. You can knock a couple hundred bucks off of those prices if you don’t want the docks, but still, these vacuums are absolutely luxury items.
If you just want something that’ll do some vacuuming so that you don’t have to, iRobot has recently announced a new Roomba option. The Roomba i3 is iRobot’s new low to midrange vacuum, starting at $400. It’s not nearly as smart as the i7 or the s9, but it can navigate (sort of) and make maps (sort of) and do some basic smart home integration. If that sounds like all you need, the i3 could be the robot vacuum for you.
iRobot calls the i3 “stylish,” and it does look pretty neat with that fabric top. Underneath, you get dual rubber primary brushes plus a side brush. There’s limited compatibility with the iRobot Home app and IFTTT, along with Alexa and Google Home. The i3 is also compatible with iRobot’s Clean Base, but that’ll cost you an extra $200, and iRobot refers to this bundle as the i3+.
The reason that the i3 only offers limited compatibility with iRobot’s app is that the i3 is missing the top-mounted camera that you’ll find in more expensive models. Instead, it relies on a downward-looking optical sensor to help it navigate, and it builds up a map as it’s cleaning by keeping track of when it bumps into obstacles and paying attention to internal sensors like a gyro and wheel odometers. The i3 can localize directly on its charging station or Clean Base (which have beacons on them that the robot can see if it’s close enough), which allows it to resume cleaning after emptying it’s bin or recharging. You’ll get a map of the area that the i3 has cleaned once it’s finished, but that map won’t persist between cleaning sessions, meaning that you can’t do things like set keep-out zones or identify specific rooms for the robot to clean. Many of the more useful features that iRobot’s app offers are based on persistent maps, and this is probably the biggest gap in functionality between the i3 and its more expensive siblings.
According to iRobot senior global product manager Sarah Wang, the kind of augmented dead-reckoning-based mapping that the i3 uses actually works really well: “Based on our internal and external testing, the performance is equivalent with our products that have cameras, like the Roomba 960,” she says. To get this level of performance, though, you do have to be careful, Wang adds. “If you kidnap i3, then it will be very confused, because it doesn’t have a reference to know where it is.” “Kidnapping” is a term that’s used often in robotics to refer to a situation in which an autonomous robot gets moved to an unmapped location, and in the context of a home robot, the best example of this is if you decide that you want your robot to vacuum a different room instead, so you pick it up and move it there.
iRobot used to make this easy by giving all of its robots carrying handles, but not anymore, because getting moved around makes things really difficult for any robot trying to keep track of where it is. While robots like the i7 can recover using their cameras to look for unique features that they recognize, the only permanent, unique landmark that the i3 can for sure identify is the beacon on its dock. What this means is that when it comes to the i3, even more than other Roomba models, the best strategy, is to just “let it do its thing,” says iRobot senior principal system engineer Landon Unninayar.
Photo: iRobot
The Roomba i3 is iRobot’s new low to midrange vacuum, starting at $400.
If you’re looking to spend a bit less than the $400 starting price of the i3, there are other options to be aware of as well. The Roomba 614, for example, does a totally decent job and costs $250. It’s scheduling isn’t very clever, it doesn’t make maps, and it won’t empty itself, but it will absolutely help keep your floors clean as long as you don’t mind being a little bit more hands-on. (And there’s also Neato’s D4, which offers basic persistent maps—and lasers!—for $330.)
The other thing to consider if you’re trying to decide between the i3 and a more expensive Roomba is that without the camera, the i3 likely won’t be able to take advantage of nearly as many of the future improvements that iRobot has said it’s working on. Spending more money on a robot with additional sensors isn’t just buying what it can do now, but also investing in what it may be able to do later on, with its more sophisticated localization and ability to recognize objects. iRobot has promised major app updates every six months, and our guess is that most of the cool new stuff is going to show in the i7 and s9. So, if your top priority is just cleaner floors, the i3 is a solid choice. But if you want a part of what iRobot is working on next, the i3 might end up holding you back. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#437610 How Intel’s OpenBot Wants to Make ...
You could make a pretty persuasive argument that the smartphone represents the single fastest area of technological progress we’re going to experience for the foreseeable future. Every six months or so, there’s something with better sensors, more computing power, and faster connectivity. Many different areas of robotics are benefiting from this on a component level, but over at Intel Labs, they’re taking a more direct approach with a project called OpenBot that turns US $50 worth of hardware and your phone into a mobile robot that can support “advanced robotics workloads such as person following and real-time autonomous navigation in unstructured environments.”
This work aims to address two key challenges in robotics: accessibility and scalability. Smartphones are ubiquitous and are becoming more powerful by the year. We have developed a combination of hardware and software that turns smartphones into robots. The resulting robots are inexpensive but capable. Our experiments have shown that a $50 robot body powered by a smartphone is capable of person following and real-time autonomous navigation. We hope that the presented work will open new opportunities for education and large-scale learning via thousands of low-cost robots deployed around the world.
Smartphones point to many possibilities for robotics that we have not yet exploited. For example, smartphones also provide a microphone, speaker, and screen, which are not commonly found on existing navigation robots. These may enable research and applications at the confluence of human-robot interaction and natural language processing. We also expect the basic ideas presented in this work to extend to other forms of robot embodiment, such as manipulators, aerial vehicles, and watercraft.
One of the interesting things about this idea is how not-new it is. The highest profile phone robot was likely the $150 Romo, from Romotive, which raised a not-insignificant amount of money on Kickstarter in 2012 and 2013 for a little mobile chassis that accepted one of three different iPhone models and could be controlled via another device or operated somewhat autonomously. It featured “computer vision, autonomous navigation, and facial recognition” capabilities, but was really designed to be a toy. Lack of compatibility hampered Romo a bit, and there wasn’t a lot that it could actually do once the novelty wore off.
As impressive as smartphone hardware was in a robotics context (even back in 2013), we’re obviously way, way beyond that now, and OpenBot figures that smartphones now have enough clout and connectivity that turning them into mobile robots is a good idea. You know, again. We asked Intel Labs’ Matthias Muller why now was the right time to launch OpenBot, and he mentioned things like the existence of a large maker community with broad access to 3D printing as well as open source software that makes broader development easier.
And of course, there’s the smartphone hardware: “Smartphones have become extremely powerful and feature dedicated AI processors in addition to CPUs and GPUs,” says Mueller. “Almost everyone owns a very capable smartphone now. There has been a big boost in sensor performance, especially in cameras, and a lot of the recent developments for VR applications are well aligned with robotic requirements for state estimation.” OpenBot has been tested with 10 recent Android phones, and since camera placement tends to be similar and USB-C is becoming the charging and communications standard, compatibility is less of an issue nowadays.
Image: OpenBot
Intel researchers created this table comparing OpenBot to other wheeled robot platforms, including Amazon’s DeepRacer, MIT’s Duckiebot, iRobot’s Create-2, and Thymio. The top group includes robots based on RC trucks; the bottom group includes navigation robots for deployment at scale and in education. Note that the cost of the smartphone needed for OpenBot is not included in this comparison.
If you’d like an OpenBot of your own, you don’t need to know all that much about robotics hardware or software. For the hardware, you probably need some basic mechanical and electronics experience—think Arduino project level. The software is a little more complicated; there’s a pretty good walkthrough to get some relatively sophisticated behaviors (like autonomous person following) up and running, but things rapidly degenerate into a command line interface that could be intimidating for new users. We did ask about why OpenBot isn’t ROS-based to leverage the robustness and reach of that community, and Muller said that ROS “adds unnecessary overhead,” although “if someone insists on using ROS with OpenBot, it should not be very difficult.”
Without building OpenBot to explicitly be part of an existing ecosystem, the challenge going forward is to make sure that the project is consistently supported, lest it wither and die like so many similar robotics projects have before it. “We are committed to the OpenBot project and will do our best to maintain it,” Mueller assures us. “We have a good track record. Other projects from our group (e.g. CARLA, Open3D, etc.) have also been maintained for several years now.” The inherently open source nature of the project certainly helps, although it can be tricky to rely too much on community contributions, especially when something like this is first starting out.
The OpenBot folks at Intel, we’re told, are already working on a “bigger, faster and more powerful robot body that will be suitable for mass production,” which would certainly help entice more people into giving this thing a go. They’ll also be focusing on documentation, which is probably the most important but least exciting part about building a low-cost community focused platform like this. And as soon as they’ve put together a way for us actual novices to turn our phones into robots that can do cool stuff for cheap, we’ll definitely let you know. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots