Instead of taking on the Roomba directly, Evolution went for the chink in iRobot's armor: wet and dry floor care.
That's a roundabout way of saying that the world of consumer robotics is defined and dominated by iRobot, whose Roombas have sold in the millions, and has inspired countless imitators, but very little innovation. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play "We needed to take a leadership role in showing the way, and expanding the marketplace." "We felt that the consumer robotics market is not growing fast enough," says Pirjanian, who's also a professor of artificial intelligence at USC. Designing and building a robot from scratch, particularly one with the cost constraints and compliance requirements inherent to appliance-grade products, was a drastic action. Evolution Robotics is typically in the business of selling components to other robotics companies, including vision-based sensors used in military UAVs. For the most dedicated robot nerds, this might ring a bell-the technology is called NorthStar, and it debuted in WowWee's Rovio, a kind of rolling webcam that could be controlled remotely over a WiFi network. Paulo Pirjanian, CEO Evolution Robotics, describes it as a micro-GPS system, with the IR spot acting as the robot's GPS satellite. Mint's upward-facing IR sensor uses that spot as a reference point as it maps out a room. A small black cube, called a beacon, projects an infrared spotlight on the ceiling. Mint's secret weapon is not a remarkably bigger or faster computer brain, but a new approach to indoor navigation. When it bumps into my foot, the robot doesn't fly off in a random direction-it heads back to the wall, shifts over a bit, and continues with its cornrows.
It's called Mint, and it's moving in a relatively neat grid across the Evolutions Robotics booth at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The robot swishing across the floor in front of me is no genius, but it might be the first cleaning bot that doesn't look completely lost. You certainly wouldn't go bragging about his autonomous capabilities and learning algorithms. You would not find this person cute, no matter how be beeped and shuffled around. Imagine a janitor slamming into desks and chairs and walls, vacuuming the same corner five times, yet always missing that one dust bunny by an inch. If humans cleaned floors the way robots do, they would be fired, or rushed to the hospital.
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