Ever since the Roomba was invented, humanity has been one step closer to a Jetsons-style future with robots performing all of our tedious tasks for us. The platform is so ubiquitous and popular with the hardware hacking community that almost anything that could be put on a Roomba has been done already, with one major exception: a Roomba with heat vision. Thanks to [marcelvarallo], though, there’s now a Roomba with almost all of the capabilities of the Predator.
The Roomba isn’t just sporting an infrared camera, though. This Roomba comes fully equipped with a Raspberry Pi for wireless connectivity, audio in and out, video streaming from a webcam (and the FLiR infrared camera), and control over the motors. Everything is wired to the internal battery which allows for automatic recharging, but the impressive part of this build is that it’s all done in a non-destructive way so that the Roomba can be reverted back to a normal vacuum cleaner if the need arises.
If sweeping a just the right time the heat camera might be the key to the messy problem we discussed on Wednesday.
The only thing stopping this from hunting humans is the addition of some sort of weapons. Perhaps this sentry gun or maybe some exploding rope. And, if you don’t want your vacuum cleaner to turn into a weapon of mass destruction, maybe you could just turn yours into a DJ.
Fun. But for equally fun things, visit the Parallax forums, and search the Prop1 for the Roomba.
Looks kinda nifty. Would have saved me a lot of hassle. You can see in the top pic on my page I had a PS2 controller wirelessly hooked up for a bit and sending control strings through the web interface from work was weird. Half thought it would short out and burn the house down while I was gone. :P
Looks like you cant get to some of the videos like the DJ one.
Cool roomba job I have a army of them. Last somer we had a roomba war with bluetooth connect to phones and tablets. we had 4 roombas going with lots of beer….
Don’t wanna toot my own horn here but…. toot toot. :D http://www.marcelvarallo.com/roomba-gladiators/
That’s how ya do it. Although, the fire was a bit silly.
Ah, but can it corner Kirstey Alley on top of a copy machine?
Whoops, misremember, a desk… https://youtu.be/LQhjPOmF3qw
I’m on it! While I’m getting this sorted, you find me that version of Kirstey Alley. :P
Small sentence fix:
“If sweeping *at* just the right time, the heat camera might be the key to *solving* the messy problem we discussed on Wednesday.”
Nice Roomba modifications.
May I suggest using a toilet plunger as the main weapon?
EXTERMINATE! (messes)
Maybe I missed the in joke, but funny you mentioned it. The FLiR resolution isn’t the best and I need it to pick up a larger area from far away with decent res. Fortunately, it responds fast enough I have decided to attempt attaching a lens suited to the wavelength then sweep scanning to make up for res.
“turn yours into a DJ.” “not available in your country” _please insert ship full of bad words_ Can you please upload it elsewhere where we can watch it from other parts of world than america? Thanks PS: NBC should die
My god, at least use different colour wires for positive and negative. Otherwise very neat.
Yeah I paid for that one shortly after doing it. Couldn’t remember which was which and my multimeter was buried in a box underneath a bunch of stuff. Wasted some time getting it out. Lesson learned again. Shortly afterwards I’d realised I did it with the FLiR as well. Can I blame it on being after midnight and I was very tired? :P
Hi,
Nice work. Are you planning on automating the video-feed processing to allow the roomba to auto-hunt people? We built similar project (using Intel Edison and a simple buffer chip to drive the roomba serial port), documentation of the build-up and the software to auto-hunt people is available at https://github.com/eschmidgall/humanChasingRoomba/blob/master/README.md .