Roomba

ROS Software Maintainer: Gonçalo Cabrita, ISR University of Coimbra

The Roomba is an autonomous vacuum cleaner sold by iRobot. It was designed to navigate a living space and avoid common obstacles such as furniture while vacuuming the floor. The Roomba was introduced in 2002 thus to the present day it has evolved over three generations into a robust dust eating machine.

iRobot also sells the Create, a cousin of the Roomba stripped down of the vacuuming apparatus, created to suit the purpose of a cheap mobile robotics research platform.

So why use the Roomba for research? First of all the Create is not available outside of the USA. Furthermore the Roomba is an attractive platform for millions of robotics hobbyist around the world who already own one. Finally when you're not doing research the Roomba can actually do something useful, clean the floor!

Installation

• C Turtle

• Diamondback

Library Overview

Most of the Roomba related ROS software can be currently found on the roomba_robot and lse_roomba_toolbox stacks.

1. Basic Configuration

2. Hardware Drivers and Simulation

3. High-Level Capabilities

4. Customizing

Although the Roomba comes equipped with a lot of sensors in order to use it with the navigation stack one will need to bring out the big guns. At a very low price the Kinect is specially attractive.

• "Adding a Hokuyo to the iRobot Roomba"

• "Adding a Kinect to an iRobot Create"

• "Assembling a LSE Roomba"

Tutorials

Running the navigation stack on the Roomba

Related Repositories

• isr-uc-ros-pkg

• https://github.com/NetBUG/roomba_500_series is a refreshed project to be compiled within Catkin workspace (tested with Indigo on iRobot Create 2, identical to 600 series Roomba). Contains additions from igor-nap for Roomba 400.