This mobile robot for vacuuming floors is a first-generation Roomba, a widely successful domestic robot. On the market beginning in 2002, the Roomba is a product of the firm iRobot, founded in Burlington, Mass., in 1990 by MIT roboticists Colin Angle, Helen Greiner and Rodney Brooks. A team of eight designed the robot, and the basic patent is 6,883,201.
The battery-operated Roomba rolls on wheels and reacts to its environment with the aid of sensors and computer processing. When it bumps into an obstacle or detects an infrared beam, a boundary line it does not cross emitted by a separate “virtual wall” unit, the robot will change direction randomly.
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