News

iRobot Announces Healthcare Unit

Last week at TEDMED, iRobot, makers of of the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, announced the creation of a healthcare division. iRobot CEO, Colin Angle, presented on the future of robots in healthcare. The new iRobot division will concentrate on developing assistive technology. In particular, they envision helping seniors to be more independent longer by providing robot assistants or nurses.

By doing so, iRobot hopes to “add a million years of independent living” to their customers. They hope to build robots that can help seniors with household chores and even see robots being able to help with administration of medicine. That seems like a pretty huge leap from an iRobot, which is a robot vacuum cleaner, but it sounds like a great idea.

I wonder what scale they will be working on. For example, it isn’t much of a leap to imagine a robot that you can put on a kitchen counter that will sort pills and alert a person that it is time to take their afternoon pills. I could even see hooking it up to a phone line and having it call a relative or social worker if the senior neglects to take their medicine.

I’ve also seen in recent months that robots are being developed to lift disabled patients from wheelchairs to beds. I wonder what other sorts of things a robot could help someone with.

For me, I’ll stick to robot vacuum cleaners for now, thank you.

The iRobot press release may be found here.

Robot Features

iRobot Create Project: Hamster-Guided Roomba

iRobot Create with Hamster Ball

This is admittedly old news, but it’s definitely cool enough to post here. Among the many products they create, iRobot has a robotics platform for eduction and tinkering that is called the iRobot Create. See here for a thorough review of this item and a page of different projects they have done internally with the iRobot Create. Among these projects is an amazingly amusing hamster-guided Roomba vacuum cleaner.

It’s hard to make out the mechanism they’re using on this robot project, but it looks like the ball is on some rollers. The rollers are probably hooked up to an optical encoding system, a lot like how the old fashioned computer mice with the balls worked. The Roomba is programmed to adjust its speed and direction to match that of the hamster.

Now all they have to do is figure out how to train the hamster to vacuum the most dirty parts of your floor. Maybe there would be some way to train the hamster to follow your shedding pets or messy kid around the house. Either way, I find it fascinating and amusing at the same time.