Tuesday, March 14, 2006

RoombaNet
"The robot that vacuums and serves web pages."

The newly-released Roomba Serial Command Interface (SCI) allows the user to drive a Roomba around and read out sensor data. But communicating with the robot via a tethered cable would interfere with the robot's autonomy, and setting your laptop on the Roomba isn't practical or smart (it also wouldn't work: the SCI expects TTL, not RS232). One logical solution is to build a (small) subsystem that can ride around with the Roomba, perform some low-level control, and communicate wirelessly with the world.

http://people.csail.mit.edu/bpadams/roomba/