Would you buy a Roomba Enhancer?

[logdog]

I had an idea and I thought I would ask the Roomba enthusiasts. For $20-30 would you buy a small device that plugged into the serial port of your Roomba and took over the brains, I.E. ran a more efficient algorithm for cleaning, Better battery management, LCD screen with info... I could make it happen, but I wonder if there would be a market for it.

[Robot-Doc]

I would certainly be interested. Would it work across all generations of SCI equipped Roombas ?

[vic7767]

You've got my interest. Is this going to be similar to the "Mind control" device where programs can be written and flashed into a device that then plugs into the SCI port and send commands to the Roomba ?

[logdog]

I currently have it designed and am testing it as a device that stays on top of your roomba, connected to your SCI port reading values and controlling the motors. It SHOULD work with ALL SCI equipped roombas, I currently only have a 500 series to test with but I am not calling any functions that are device specific. As things progress, I might want a few testers with 5XX, 4XXX, and 7XX robots to test for me. Some of the features of the current algorithm include a FULL edge cleaning (perimeter) pass when you start it from the base, bringing persistant pass cleaning (going back and forth over a dirty spot) to ALL roombas, and MUCH faster and more efficient navigation (not Neato quality, but as close as you can get with a bumper sensor) and improved room/house size detection (detecting that the space is too big for one charge, charging and then continuing to clean). If anyone has ideas on how to make this better, I would LOVE to hear them as I continue development.

[soviet911]

I would be interested to see how it goes. One of the features I would be interested in is being able to select maximum speed for roomba travel, since it tends to hit our furniture at full speed some times, as well as slower speed would make for better cleaning. Not sure how you would do it, maybe an ability to hook up to the board via USB to add custom parameters would be nice as well (not necessarily a GUI, but I would love to have a board like the one you are making and being able to add code to it my self easily).

[djos]

Interesting project logdog, are you planning on storing some kind of rough travel/bump/distance map to get an idea of the room size and rough location of the roomba and items in that map as it proceeds?

One thing I always thought would help overcome the limitations of using wheel-rotations (can be very inaccurate due to wheel slip etc) was some kind of triangulation using at least 1 RF equipped Lighthouse as the fixed point to continually triangulate against - this would allow imo the building of a very accurate map and "travel log".

Sort of like this:



where the Neato marks the physical walls it encounters and tracks where it's been - obviously the roomba cant see very far in front of itself but one way to tackle this, and have it clean room by room would be to, implement a wall following discovery mode with logic rules something like this (i'll use basic style to demo):

10 Find wall
20 follow wall
30 if bump into new wall goto 20, else no more wall continue in straight line
40 if return to start point goto 50, else goto 10
50 start methodical cleaning
60 etc

this logic is very crude but im sure you get the idea.