Beauty and the Roomba (TM)

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  Image of the hardware

Inspiration

Roombas are a great way of cleaning your apartment while you're away from home. However, 80% of the time it sits in your closet all alone without any companionship or purpose, so we decided to give it more than one task. This project aims to solve the problem of user's desires for learning basic dance moves while taking advantage of having a Roomba at home (and finally giving meaning for the Roomba's life).

What it does

Beauty and the Roomba (TM) aims to provide busy millennials with the ability to learn very basic Waltz steps by following the Roomba. The Roomba wants to provide more than just cleaning services by enabling you to get more use out of it. We hope that by being able to teach you basic steps as the user you will gain more confidence and perhaps join a dance class, learn something new quickly, and be able to interact with the robot, as robots are known to often be anthropomorphized.

How we built it

We built it using Pyserial API, iRobot API, Python, and the resources available on iRobot on opcode. The API was used to be able to convert the opcode provided in the Create2 manuals to Python. For inspiration we also used open source code on GitHub as well as read about different hacks that had already been created with Roomba.

Challenges we ran into

The greatest challenge encountered during these last 24 hours was coming up with an idea. However, once the idea was created there were several other challenges that we, as a team, ran into. The most notable challenge however was connecting and sending signals to the hardware, because we were not familiar with the process and there was a steep learning curve. Additional challenges included figuring out the co-ordinate systems and the right speed to the tempo.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The most notable accomplishment, apart from the constant joy every time it worked was ensuring that the software was able to move and play songs simultaneously. This was an accomplishment because we had envisioned the robot to be able to do that simultaneously and seeing it come alive was nothing short of amazing.

What's next for Beauty and the Roomba (TM)

We would hope that Beauty and the Roomba (TM) would be able to have more precise dance moves by having sharper turns. We also hope that it would be able to take on any dance style such as salsa and more complicated Waltz moves. We also hope that it would be able to eventually train data through machine learning of how the user moves in order to have more precise data about the user and recognize who is using it (if more than one user). We also would like to add features such as cameras and sensors for precision.

Built With

• irobot-api
• opscode
• pyserial
• python