Hasta La Gadget!

The Solar-Breeze robot is the perfect companion to the Roomba, Scooba, and any other robot you have cleaning your house.

An intelligent swimming pool surface skimmer with an attached chlorine dispenser, this robot removes surface debris, including leaves, organic material, pollens, dust, and even suntan oils. As the name states, this robot runs on solar power. Just leave the robot in the pool and it will continuously swim around, cleaning, while the sun shines.

The internal Lithium Ion batteries are charged by the sun during the day, so it can run at night and cloudy days for several hours, as well.

The rear paddle wheel propels the robot through the water while the front paddle wheel scoops the surface debris and film into the collection tray, located underneath. Bumper wheels on the corners rotate the Solar Breeze to a new direction whenever it bumps into the wall. It is designed to stay near the edges of the pool where dirt and debris generally accummulate. It changes directions to get around obstacles or to get to the other end of the pool.

Removing the junk from the pool before it sinks to the pool means no bottom cleaning or filtering. That’s a savings because the pump doesn’t need to be run as much. It’s also a time-saver over the manual pool skimmer.

Tagged with a $500 price tag from Solar Pool Technologies, it’s a little pricey, but you don’t want to deny your cleaning robots a new friend, do you?

Robots need to be useful, whether it’s vacuuming the rug, picking up things, or bringing you a soda. Willow Garage’s PR2 leaves it up to you to decide what it will do.

With the PR2, the hardware is taken care of. It’s up to you, the robot-maker, to take advantage of over 1000 software libraries available to decide what it will do.

It has a lot of potential, with powerful “brains” and a full sensor suite. The brains are a pair of onboard Xeon servers with eight cores, 24GB of RAM, and a 2TB hard disk drive. Power comes from a 1.3kWh battery and onboard chargers.
 
Perched on top of an omnidirectional base, the PR2 ships with a 5-megapixel camera, forearm cameras, and gripper tip sensors as part of its arsenal of sensors. PR2 navigates its surroundings using the two LIDAR optical remote sensors to know where things are located. It has two arms and grippers.

It has strong network capabilities, such as a Gigabit Ethernet network with 32GB backplane switch and dual WiFi radios and a base station.

The hardware is all yours for the price of $400,000. For that price, I would need the robot to clean my house, cook me dinner, and give me a massage.

Right off the bat, the Bananas Apebot is different from any other humanoid robot you’ve seen. For starters, it’s manners are straight out of the jungle. It makes rude noises and shambles around looking like, well, an ape.

It does very little that’s useful; no cleaning, no picking up things. Instead, the Apebot tap dances, hums, and breaks wind (I am sure you can think of a person or two who would love this feature). This little ‘bot is purely for entertainment.

The ‘bananas’ in the name refers to the gorilla’s temper. If the Apebot is disturbed while sleeping or tipped over, it throws a full-blown tantrum, pounding fists, flashing its laser eyes, and roaring. How to soothe the enraged simian? Tickle the belly, of course.

This gem comes from the smart folks over at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute. The Apebot balances on spiraling arms to easily get around on carpet, hardwood, and even dirt. Sensors inside allows the Apebot to react to the environment, such as sniffing and growling at obstacles. It has wrist-mounted rockets that it can fire. There is also a remote control (that resembles two bananas fused together) if you want to tell it what to do.

It supposedly can play dodge ball and if paired with a fellow Apebot, the two gorillas can play laser tag. That sounds like something worth seeing.

Instead of the near universal white, blue, or black for robots, the Apebot is an eye-cringing yellowish orange.

The Bananas Apebot runs off eight AA batteries and the remote requires three AAA batteries.Priced at $79.95 online at specialty stores like Hammacher Schlemmer, this is an expensive but fun gift.

Robots make everything better, right?

Case in point: Roboscooper, the new WowWee robot that picks up small objects from the floor. The key word is small: The robot refuses to pick up anything heavier than 1 ounce. All those paperclips, nuts, earrings, and small stuff that needs to get picked up before your Roomba can get to work are fair game.

Resembling a hunched-over baby RoboSapien, Roboscooper has a cute face, two arms ready to pick up anything, and six wheels to roll on. It even comes with a remote control in case it’s not enough to let the little guy wander around aimlessly looking for things to pickup. The obstacle sensor lets Robo detect and go around obstacles (heavier than  an ounce, of course). The remote even lets you switch into a Whack mode, which makes the robot swat objects out of the way instead of picking them up.

A while back, I got my hands on a Revell VEXplorer Robotics System, a DIY robotic kit, and built a sturdy little tank with a robotic arm and a videocam. With my remote control, I could get little Vexie to pick up soda cans, bring me round cylindrical objects, and drag a toy mouse to torment the kitten. Between the Roomba and Vexie, the Roboscooper will feel right at home.

For $70 dollars and six AAA batteries, this robot will clean your house while you laugh, especially after you load fun phrases and sound effects into its little brain. WowWee is accepting pre-orders now to begin shipping at the end of August.

Via Engadget