Editor’s note: Last week, Amazon announced that it was acquiring iRobot for $1.7 billion, prompting questions about how iRobot’s camera-equipped robot vacuums will protect the data that they collect about your home. In September of 2017, we spoke with iRobot CEO Colin Angle about iRobot’s approach to data privacy, directly addressing many similar concerns. “The […]
This morning, Amazon and iRobot announced “a definitive merger agreement under which Amazon will acquire iRobot” for US $1.7 billion. The announcement was a surprise, to put it mildly, and we’ve barely had a chance to digest the news. But taking a look at what’s already known can still yield initial (if incomplete) answers as […]
Today, Clearpath Robotics is opening pre-orders for the newest, fanciest TurtleBot: the TurtleBot 4. Built on top of iRobot’s Create 3 in close partnership with Open Robotics, the TurtleBot 4 is “the next-generation of the world’s most popular open-source robotics platform for education and research, offering superior computing power, more payload capacity, improved sensors, and […]
Happy National Robotics Week! It’s a very special NRW this year, because iRobot has seen fit to announce a brand new robot that is guaranteed to leave your floors 0 percent cleaner. And there was much rejoicing, because this is not a mop or a vacuum, but instead a new and updated version of iRobot […]
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!): ICRA 2022: 23–27 May 2022, Philadelphia ERF 2022: 28–30 June 2022, […]
I am not a fan of Alexa. Or Google Assistant. Or, really, any Internet-connected camera or microphone which has a functionality based around being in my house and active all of the time. I don’t use voice-activated systems, and while having a webcam is necessary, I make sure to physically unplug it from my computer […]
The power that computer vision has gained over the last decade or so has been astonishing. Thanks to machine learning techniques applied to large datasets of images and video, it’s now much easier for robots to recognize (if not exactly understand) the world around them, and take intelligent (or at least significantly less unintelligent) actions […]