Finally! A Roomba that Can Pick Up the Remote and Nurture the Lazy in Us
Check out this modified Roomba that can deftly scoop objects up from the floor and then hand it over to a human.
In geekspeak, this attachment to the trusty old Roomba is called an “empirically validated end effector for non-prehensile grasping of objects from the floor” — certainly a mouthful but in domestic terms, it’s simply a high-tech dustpan.
This end effector is a collaboration of three geniuses from the University of Washington and the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Healthcare Robotics Lab with the primary goal of assisting motor-impaired individuals who may have trouble with such ordinary tasks as picking up dropped objects from the floor.
The “tweaked” Roomba can position itself squarely in front of that object then take hold of it with an open-loop strategy consistent from object to object be it a medicine bottle, a smaller medicine box, or an even tinier single pill. A mechanism to scissor-lift or raise the objects to a higher level once they are grasped is already in the works.
While the creation of this dustpan attachment for the Roomba would definitely be a handy help to the elderly and physically-challenged individuals, this has also given some lazy but perfectly-able adults, me included of course, some really cool ideas on what these robots can do next.
How’s this for a start? Roomba! A beer and some pizza, quick!
