New Roomba building card rooms during cleaning (method SLAM)

The robot vacuum cleaner Roomba - a great helper in the household and the world's most popular home robot, but its navigation algorithm has never been perfect. The robot carried the occasional strange maneuvers ran things, and so on. D. The developers of the company iRobot corrected mistakes - and have released a new intelligent processor Roomba 980, that ориентируется smokers is much better than his ancestor .

Earlier Roomba moved more or less randomly, changing direction when encountering an obstacle. He was doing a job properly, but such a process can not be called effective or reasonable. Roomba 980 uses a new approach.

For the mapping of rooms and a vacuum cleaner equipped with a navigation camera and software with pattern recognition. (would have heard this phrase someone half a century ago ...) i>

Here's how Roomba 980 builds a map of the premises at least pass through all the rooms. In the animation process is shown in an accelerated mode.



Vacuums do not move randomly, but instead a clear and methodically cleans the entire surface area, moving geometrically correct way.



This technique is known as "the simultaneous orientation and mapping» (simultaneous location and mapping, SLAM). SLAM technique has been studied by scientists for decades, but only recently found application in commercial products.

Traditionally, SLAM requires large computational resources. To make this method work on the built-in vacuum cleaner computer, it took considerably refined and optimized algorithms.

John Leonard (John Leonard), a professor at MIT and one of the inventors of technology SLAM, said интервью MIT Technology Review, now the invention is truly a valuable tool. Many manufacturers of unmanned vehicles, including Google, are used for navigation approaches based on the technique of SLAM. It is also used for navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles. What iRobot introduces a product based SLAM, it is great news for all researchers, who have long been working in this area.

Roomba 980 combines information from cameras and other sensors. Thus, the robot vacuum cleaner is able to navigate in space, even if the chamber is closed, for example, because of a cat sitting on top of that happens surprisingly often a >.

For security reasons, the card room and a video is removed from memory after the end of the working session.

In addition to advanced navigation, the new vacuum cleaner models doubled battery life for the first time have the opportunity to control it from your smartphone. Roomba 980 sells for $ 899, that is, two hundred more expensive than ever. But in order to please the cat, no money do not mind. i>

Source: