Irobot

Geek Out

The US Army’s Robot Eyes

12:15PM January 8, 2012 | Brent Rose

If something terrible happens at your job, you might file a report about it and your boss will follow up on it. If something terrible happens at a bomb tech’s job, they might get exploded. A tragedy if it’s a human being. But if it’s a robot? A small lump sum out of the defence budget. More »


Geek Out

The Sad Story Of A Real Life R2-D2 Who Saved Countless Human Lives And Died

6:00AM December 29, 2011 | Brent Rose

Robots can’t have feelings. But humans develop feelings for them. You know, like R2-D2 in Star Wars. Or like Scooby Doo, a real life small robot that saved the day 19 times. This is his single-tear story. More »


Science

The Time I Planted A Pipe Bomb Under A Truck

9:45AM December 28, 2011 | Brent Rose

I almost crash into a truck, at first. I can turn on a dime and accelerate like a tiny nitrous-oxide-fueled bat out of hell — even though I’m holding a 10-pound pipe bomb, 30 per cent of my body weight. I don’t know what I’m doing, really. But by the time I get to the truck to plant the bomb, it’s easy. I know exactly what to do. Boom. More »


Geek Out

Meet The Real-Life War Machines

2:30AM December 27, 2011 | Brent Rose

Like the prologue of any robo-apocalypse movie where the machines rise up to destroy us, most of the robots we hear about do things we could do, but don’t want to. They mop our floors. They put together cars. They die for us. More »


Gadgets

Scooba 230: My Beloved, Adorable, Floor Cleaning Robo-Slave

6:30AM May 19, 2011 | Sam Biddle

The 230 is the nook, cranny, and floor-scrubbing baby brother of the Scooba family by iRobot. Taking up little more space than a CD, it’s only a few inches tall. It won’t replace your mop, but it’ll tirelessly try. More »


Science

Super-Geek Builds DIY Chatbot To Speak To His Fiancée

1:00PM February 12, 2011 | Jacob Aron

Johnny Chung Lee has hacked the Wiimote, helped Microsoft develop Kinect and recently started working at Google. This last career move meant moving away from his fiancée, so he did what any self-respecting geek would do: he built a video chat robot. More »


Gadgets

The Smallest Robot Floor-Washer? It’s Got To Be iRobot’s Scooba 230

5:40AM January 4, 2011 | Kat Hannaford

There are plenty of robot vacuum cleaners on the market right now (one of which keeps mounting the foot of my curtains like a randy dog), but iRobot’s Scooba 230 can fit between bathroom furniture like nothing else. More »


Military Roomba Cleans Land Mines With Explosions

7:40AM June 2, 2010 | Jesus Diaz

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Like its domestic ancestor, iRobot’s new military robot is also a cleaning machine. But instead of dust devils, this one cleans land mines and barbwire obstacles. It works using the Mk7 Anti-personnel Obstacle Breaching System. Not subtle, but extremely effective. More »


Gadgets

The Navy’s Fleet Of Uber Classified High Tech Ship Cleaning Robots

6:40AM February 20, 2010 | Mark Wilson

The robots that scrub the decks on the USS Freedom? They’re just simple Roombas. More »


Deadly Viper Killed By IRobot Roomba

7:00AM November 28, 2009 | Kat Hannaford

There are worse things to worry about in the Middle East than a robotic vacuum cleaner, but to the viper who thought it’d be a cozy place to sleep, it proved to be the end of his violent, snakey existence. More »