iRobot

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?

Fresh on the heels of releasing redesigned Roomba models, iRobot will be announcing 2 new robots at the Digital Life event in New York City on September 27. CEO Colin Angle, a keynote speaker at the event, gives a clue about one of the robots. In an interview with CNET, Angle thinks "lawn mowing is a great robot application .. we're going to be announcing two new products at Digital Life: one of them is not a lawnmower". So the other could be a lawnmower right?

If this is true, iRobot will not be the first to venture into this market. Robot lawnmowers are already being sold by companies like Sweden's Husqvarna and Israel's (privately owned) Friendly Robotics.

The new model robots are designed to require much less human supervision. Here's the low-down on the new iRobot Roomba 500 series (530, 560 and 570):

• Anti-tangle technology to free itself of tassles and tangles (demo here)
• Able to sense walls/furniture and automatically slows down to soften the impact (demo below)
• Operates with one push of the clean button
• Better motion on thick carpets and transition between surfaces
• 33% larger dirt-bin
• IR walls ('Virtual Wall Lighthouses') prevent the robot from venturing into another room before the first is cleaned (only on 560 and 570 - demo below)
• On-board scheduling (only on 560 and 570)
• Improved side-brush to better clean corners and edges
• Modular design for easier upgrades/repair
• Wireless controller for Roomba 570
• Custom face-plates
... continued

iRobot has filed a lawsuit against Robotic FX, a company founded and headed by a former iRobot employee. The maker of the popular Roomba and Pack Bot (leftmost photo) claims that Robotic FX violated two of its patents in selling the "knock-off" Negotiator bot (photo 2 and 3). The Negotiator does look suspiciously similar to the Pack Bot huh?

According to iRobot, "It would be irresponsible to allow a former employee to infringe our intellectual property, or use iRobot's confidential information, to sell an unproven imitation that does not have the capabilities of our PackBot robots."

iRobot - famous maker of the Roomba, Scooba and PackBot - has just unveiled a new pair of robots for cleaning swimming pools dubbed Verro. The robots have apparently been developed by a company called Aquatron but branded as iRobot bots. iRobot has some videos of the cleaning bots in action here.

Yeah, it's great that Verro can clean away dirt as small as 2 microns but I'm not jumping into the local swimming pool until iRobot gets rid of cheeky little Sammy who pees in the pool!