irobot

Sneaky intelligent machines have convinced their future human servants to put on the first National Robotics Week, announcing to the masses that robots can "make life easier."

April 10-18, 2010 may go down in history as the week when Americans officially embraced robotic beings as their new best friends. Just look at what happened with Jell-O. In 2001, the Utah legislature declared a Jell-O Week, and now Jello-O is everywhere--in our fridges, in our thoughts, and in our stomachs.

But make no mistake, robots are far more nefarious than gelatin dessert. Companies such as iRobot and Adept Technology, … Read more

Evolution Robotics is introducing an automatic floor cleaner for hard surfaces that can get those tricky spots like corners, edges, and places under furniture.

The Mint robot mop and duster being introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show uses disposable or reusable cleaning cloths to get the job done. You put a Swiffer or Pledge cloth on the bottom, push a button, and off it goes.

The dry cloths trap dirt and dust. When set to mop mode and given a wet cloth, Mint does a back-and-forth movement to scrub floors.

The sexy, compact machine uses Evolution Robotics' NorthStar navigation technology. … Read more

Advanced gamer hardware may soon allow PacBot operators to tell exactly how hard a robot's grip is, allowing soldiers to more safely pick up and handle fragile or dangerous objects, while also increasing their situational awareness.

Novint Technologies, a company that makes 3D touch controllers for video and computer games, announced last month that it has been awarded a subcontract to co-develop a remote touch kit (RTK) for the iRobot unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) PacBot.

The new RTK will allow soldiers to tactually sense the amount of force a robot is exerting from a safe operating distance--a first for … Read more

We're getting a first glimpse of that shape-shifting ChemBot we first told you about last year, and well, it looks like the love child of a beating heart and a wad of Silly Putty.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Army Research Office awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to iRobot to create the flexible military bot. The maker of the Roomba and Scooba, along with University of Chicago researchers, showed off the oozy results at the Iros conference (the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) in St. Louis this week.

DARPA envisions the … Read more

BERLIN--In the midst of America's raging debate on the future of health insurance, one man says he has a solution to out-of-control health care costs: more robots.

Of course, this is coming from Colin Angle, a roboticist and CEO of iRobot, the company that makes both robotic vacuum cleaners and bomb-defusing gadgets currently in use by the U.S. military. At IFA here on Friday, he said that robotic telepresence devices, which would act like nurses in a person's home, could reduce the $2.2 trillion, or 17 percent of the U.S. GDP, currently spent on health … Read more

Best known for its Roomba vacuums, iRobot also counts the U.S. Army as a top customer. And the latest Army deal is the company's single biggest.

iRobot said Tuesday it has received an order from the U.S. Army for $35.3 million for robots equipped to help soldiers safely evaluate dangerous conditions.

The order, made by the U.S. Army TACOM Contracting Center in Warren, Mich., calls for 486 iRobot PackBot 510 with FasTac Kit robots by March 31, 2010. This single order is part of an overall larger contract worth $286 million, of which $125 million … Read more

To combat a robot invasion in the movies, the hero may need some sort of high-powered superweapon. To slow one down in real life, a heaping helping of recession should do the trick.

NextGen Research on Tuesday eased back the throttle on hopes for a surge in the number of robots arriving on the home front in the near future. In its new "Personal Robotics 2009" report, the research company forecasts that the global market for personal robots will be worth more than $5 billion in 2015, up from just over $1 billion seen for this year.

Put … Read more

Corrections were made to this interview. See below for details.

The PackBot robot has made a name for itself in dangerous places like Iraq, but the future may belong to both its bigger and smaller siblings.

U.S. military forces have long made use of the PackBot to discover and disarm roadside bombs, keeping flesh-and-blood soldiers out of harm's way. Now its maker, iRobot, is looking to make inroads with two variations on the design.

The SUGV (short for small unmanned ground vehicle) may be one of the technologies that emerges in good shape from the Army's massively … Read more

Many CNET readers have been complaining that they're not seeing the major deals they thought the economy would encourage in electronics.

I agree. I haven't seen them yet, either. But here's one: iRobot is having a one-day sale on Friday until midnight on its Roomba 416 for $200, with a free upgrade kit for handling pet hair.

The Roomba 416 comes with two beacons for controlling where the Roomba roams, and it can clean up to two rooms before needing to be recharged, according to iRobot. It does not offer the onboard scheduling feature of the higher-end … Read more