‘I bring forth DOOMBA, a half-goat, half-script creature’
December 27, 2018 11:08 AM Subscribe
This Roomba can create its own Doom levels. [Polygon] “Game developer and designer Rich Whitehouse gave the world an unusual present this Christmas Eve. It’s called Doomba, and it uses the popular Roomba vacuuming robots to create levels for Doom, the classic first-person shooter. [...] To do the work, some Roombas use a creepy little electronic eyeball to create detailed maps of your home. Doomba takes that map and makes it into a level of Hell.”
What if Roomba gets trapped underneath the sofa. That level would get tedious (and dusty) fast.....
posted by triage_lazarus at 11:24 AM on December 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by triage_lazarus at 11:24 AM on December 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
If you had told my housemates and I in 1994 that one day robotic vacuum cleaners would be designing DOOM levels it would have made us cough-take into our bongs.
posted by The Card Cheat at 12:07 PM on December 27, 2018 [26 favorites]
posted by The Card Cheat at 12:07 PM on December 27, 2018 [26 favorites]
And if your cat should happen to puke in its vicinity, the Doomba goes beyond the map to make your actual apartment into a level of Hell.
posted by chimpsonfilm at 12:42 PM on December 27, 2018 [9 favorites]
posted by chimpsonfilm at 12:42 PM on December 27, 2018 [9 favorites]
I had one of the first generation Roombas. It was useless. It was a fraud. For something called a Robot Vacuum, it was neither robot nor vacuum. I mean, if that was a robot, then so is the fill valve in your toilet. It just ran around the room until it bounced off something, then it turned and went the other way for a while. And it wasn't even a vacuum cleaner. It just brushed stuff up off the floor and wound it really tightly around the shaft of its motorized brush. When it was done, you emptied out the dust cup, then you spent an hour or so taking it apart and cleaning hair out of the brush and unwrapping tightly coiled fibers from around the shaft or else it wouldn't work at all next time. The time you spent cleaning the thing to keep it functioning was...well, you just should have vacuumed yourself and been done with it.
This VSLAM stuff is what I thought it was going to be doing when I bought the damn thing, but I guess iRobot had to fake it until they made it. For like 15 years, apparently.
If the thing could have created Doom levels, I would have kept it.
posted by Naberius at 5:08 PM on December 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
This VSLAM stuff is what I thought it was going to be doing when I bought the damn thing, but I guess iRobot had to fake it until they made it. For like 15 years, apparently.
If the thing could have created Doom levels, I would have kept it.
posted by Naberius at 5:08 PM on December 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
...When it was done, you emptied out the dust cup, then you spent an hour or so taking it apart and cleaning hair out of the brush and unwrapping tightly coiled fibers from around the shaft or else it wouldn't work at all next time...
In my house this was known as Robot Maintenance, and I was the Robot Maintenance Technician.
Not to mention Manual Crane Operator for gathering and disposal of Canine Solid Waste (among other highly prestigious and essential household positions).
posted by ElGuapo at 9:38 AM on December 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
In my house this was known as Robot Maintenance, and I was the Robot Maintenance Technician.
Not to mention Manual Crane Operator for gathering and disposal of Canine Solid Waste (among other highly prestigious and essential household positions).
posted by ElGuapo at 9:38 AM on December 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
When the first Roomba came out, I worked for a robotics startup. We were in awe of the Roomba's engineering, which kept things extremely simple and let it do so much for the incredible price point of $200. We pretty quickly started working on vacuumbots, with the idea that we could make something way better than the Roomba using our industry-leading (at the time) VSLAM system. We set up a simulated living room, and tested the random-walking $200 Roomba against our VSLAM smart vacuum, which probably cost more than $1000.
The result was that after an hour, the random Roomba got 95% coverage and our fancy, expensive VSLAM bot got 98% coverage. We shelved the idea of a smart vaccum bot until we came up with other approaches that didn't require lots of RAM and powerful CPUs. (Later, some of my colleagues went on to become executives and chief scientists at iRobot.)
Sometimes a random walk is hard to beat. ("Lessons Learned from Robotic Vacuum Cleaners Entering in the Home Ecosystem" has a more careful comparison of SLAM vacuums vs. non-SLAM. Or just look at the coverage sample images here.)
posted by jjwiseman at 4:03 PM on December 28, 2018 [2 favorites]
The result was that after an hour, the random Roomba got 95% coverage and our fancy, expensive VSLAM bot got 98% coverage. We shelved the idea of a smart vaccum bot until we came up with other approaches that didn't require lots of RAM and powerful CPUs. (Later, some of my colleagues went on to become executives and chief scientists at iRobot.)
Sometimes a random walk is hard to beat. ("Lessons Learned from Robotic Vacuum Cleaners Entering in the Home Ecosystem" has a more careful comparison of SLAM vacuums vs. non-SLAM. Or just look at the coverage sample images here.)
posted by jjwiseman at 4:03 PM on December 28, 2018 [2 favorites]
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posted by jim in austin at 11:14 AM on December 27, 2018 [5 favorites]