PayPerPost is holding an interesting contest called the PPP Blog Battle Royale. They want you to submit your idea for your ideal robot from iRobot. Being a part-time semi-amateur roboteer myself, I couldn’t help but throw down myself. I’ve been through other people’s posts and with only a few exceptions, most are pie-in-the sky ideas. These are great if you’re writing a science fiction novel, but iRobot is a real company that is actively engaged in selling the things that people want and will buy today. They kicked it all off with their famous Roomba.
What made the Roomba so popular was that it did what it promised, vacuum your carpet in an automated manner and it carried a reasonable price tag. Sure Asimo is more advanced and you might even be able to program it to use your regular vacuum cleaner, but you’ll need approximately one million dollars, $500K at the very least, to get one of your own. That’s just not going to work its way into the reality of today. It’s much like the concept cars we see at car shows. They are a materialization of our dreams, they are beautiful, powerful, unique and most of all, completely impractical.
Moving on the success of the Roomba robot, they followed up with a host of other ready for market products including Dirt Dog, a workshop bot that works as a shop-vac. There is also Verro, a pool cleaning bot and one of my co-workers’ favourite bots, Scooba, the floor washing robot.
The two things that tie each of these robots together is simple functionality and affordability. You don’t need to program it once you get it, it already knows how to do what it needs to do. That’s a key element that’s lacking in many of the pie-in-the-sky ideas I’ve read. It’s also very affordable. These are essentially medium to large Christmas presents for most middle class families. They’re certainly not an impulse purchase, but you also don’t need to take out a loan to get one.
So with all of that background, what would my ideal iRobot design be? Well my personal vote would be for an affordable, light-duty version of their packbot. But then I’m the kind of guy who likes to build robots and the market for a chassis alone would likely be small. If we take the idea a bit broader though, we can find an interesting product that can be commercially viable.
The one huge advantage that the packbot platform holds over its brethren is its ability to climb and descend (in a controlled manner) stairs. What I envision is a fetchbot. Using a cell phone as an interface, you can request that fetchbot gets you one of a few pre-determined items that have been loaded up into a dockable vending machine style container. Fetchbot spends most of its day docked to its base station, making sure that it’s charged and ready for action. Once goods are called for, Fetchbot activates a mechanical switch in the dock to release the desired item. Think of it like a candy machines only less complex. You would have pre-loaded items into the nine available slots. Items generally range in size from a personal sized bag of chips to a pack of gum. two of the slots are able to be refrigerated so that you could load up cans of pop or bottles of water. Once fetchbot has the desired item, it locates the cellphone that made the request and delivers it.
Now I know what you’re thinking. An invention to bring lazy couch potatoes their junk food. Well I’m not going to lie to you. People would buy it for that reason. But there’s another reason to get it as well. The aging society we live in has many seniors living in their homes, caring for themselves as best they can. In many cases these individuals are able to take care of their necessities, but do with great difficulty. Stairs in particular are normally a significant challenge. Once a senior goes upstairs to bed, the thought of needing something from downstairs is unbearable since they’ll have to go down, then back up just for something like a glass of water. This is where Fetchbot really shines. While they may have difficulty with stairs, Fetchbot can go up and down as long as it stays charged. For seniors, it could be loaded with bottled water, light snacks, an extra stash of medication, even fruit (in a refrigerated slot, set to crisp).
What about the practical elements? Well, it wouldn’t need to be programmed. With very simple decision making trees and minor data storage, a packbot could learn the layout of the home in no time on its own. As for the cell phone interface, a simple nightly glance at the items available in the slots from Fetchbot would be uploaded to the cell phone’s software interface. Then you simply select the item you would like from the nine images on the screen. While this would work best on phones like the iPhone, it can still be done on a substantial portion of today’s phones.
Cost is the next practical element. The development for this robot would be greater than that undertaken for the existing robots, but it would fall well within the scope of iRobot’s expertise. The packbot chassis could be leaned up and softened up to make it significantly more affordable. While it would need to withstand several tumbles down a flight of stairs, a 400G impact isn’t in this robots visible future. The base station would require some engineering, but it’s certainly nothing exotic. At the end of the day, I believe a production Fetchbot would likely start anywhere from $1599.99 - $1999.99 for early adopters. Later revisions could likely breach the $999.99 mark with features aditional to those described here.
So that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
This presents a commercially viable robot that iRobot could develop based on existing expertise and platforms. The initial investment would be relatively small and would push iRobot further past its competitors in domestic robots development.
As a side note, if iRobot is looking to hire a semi-amateur robot builder with a computer science degree, experience in accidentally welding drill bits into aluminum stock and drilling holes a little crooked, I’m your man.
robot, robotics
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