Looj

Engadget wrote about the Looj, we told you about the ConnectR, and now the folks at Roomba Review seem to have captured iRobot prematurely updating their website with the two products. The iRobot page, now long gone, described the ConnectR as a "virtual visiting robot", making it sound more like a telepresence robot. The Looj was described as capable of cleaning 'an 80-foot section of gutter in just 10 minutes' of standard 'K-style, aluminum, copper, metal or vinyl gutters.'

Yeah, we were a little pissed about the iRobot Looj, but it's only because we expected more innovation from iRobot. Today, we may have found the name and brief description of the second robot that iRobot is due to debut at Digital Life: the iRobot Connectr. The company filed a trademark for Connectr a week ago on Sep 5 for "robots for video and audio monitoring, surveillance, and communication". It sounds like a spy robot for military or police use but it could be a telepresence robot too, a Spykee of sorts?

You can imagine our glee and excitement when we heard iRobot was to announce two new robots at this year's Digital Life scheduled for September 27. Would iRobot finally be working on a search and rescue robot or getting into the hobby robot market with a bipedal Robo-One style robot? Okay, we did get a tad carried away but a gutter cleaner? Oh, robots all over the world are probably wiggling their servos in dismay. iRobot may as well change their Nasdaq ticker symbol to "LAME". Yes, Engadget found FCC filings which show an iRobot bot named Looj whose purpose is to clean out your home's rain gutter. Where's the AI in that? To make things worse, it looks as though it's radio controlled. We will be starkly disappointed if this turns out to be the much-anticipated new product from iRobot. Our expectations have been much higher, after all iRobot's CTO is non other than the Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)!

Unfortunately, Looj may be real. Looj is filed as a trademark name by iRobot (see image above). What of the other robot? Could it be named CR8, short for Crate possibly? Well, a simple search of names trademarked by iRobot yielded 23 terms (also captured above). CR8 is the only one not associated with any current iRobot product. Could iRobot be finally releasing the CoWorker robot? It doesn't seem likely but after seeing the Looj, who knows?