Teach Your Roomba How to Act

The kids at myRoomBud have come up with an even better way to give your Roomba vacuum robot a personality.

They have been selling custom costumes for the rug robots for awhile. Now they have come up with the idea to make the robot character go more than skin deep.



Using the programming accessory RooTooth from Robodynamics you can communicate with your Roomba through a computer.

The myRoomBud folks have designed personalities and made a windows program, 'myRoomBud Is Alive Dashboard or MIAD (pronounced 'maid')' to teach them to your Roomba. The program includes a frog that hops, a tiger that growls and a French maid that wiggles.
Very cute.

They are also working on a voice command interface.

An observation - it may be obvious - robot personality and advanced 'artificial intelligence' are not necessarily coupled. It does not take a robot with near human intelligence or brain-like reasoning capacity to become a friendly interacting member of the family - as a pet or helper.

The development of human to robot relationships could advance at very different rate than the science of artificial intelligence. The next invention in robot personalities no longer depends on the next step in technology. It will be driven more by what people want.

I guess we had to reach a certain level of capability before this decoupling could occur.

Anyway, it is nice that you can now pick a personality, sort of like a font, to go in your vacuum cleaner. Will we need to start upgrading our other applances? And, will they all get along?

Will people's household robots start to resemble them? Or the other way around?

myRoomBud RoomBud iRobot Roomba costumes