commercial 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!

Figla, a Japanese company dealing in glass and cosmetics of all things, has developed a cleaning robot for industrial use. According to a rough translation of the company's Japanese website, the autonomous robot can wax the floor, vacuum and it avoids obstacles using ultrasonic, bump and infra-red sensors. It's got wireless LAN built in and can have a camera attachment for remote operation and it can talk. See here and here for some cool videos. Is it just me, or can you hear Figla's robot say "who's your daddy, Roomba?" in the second video?