Vacuum Cleaner Project Zero

This project was a long term effort to create a great robotic vacuum cleaner. When I first interacted with Lab 318, the project was in its third revision and almost everyone had worked on some aspect of it at some point. Like our other long term fullscale project, the Robotic Lawn Mower, we did not talk about it every day. Also, because it was it was only a revision, we did not need to redevelop everything from the ground up. As far as I know, the task started as a face lift on the current frame and then some performance improvements were included in the mechanical object and software.

My role on this team was quite small in the grand scheme of things because most of the permenant crew were not English speakers. At first, I worked on some of the early concept work when the face lift was being set out. Later I worked as a consultant using prior knowledge of the end market place as well as knowledge of robotics and algorithm design which would be used to construct more efficient artificial intelligence. Finally, I went to the manufacturing facility in one of the later stints with the company's engineers.

This project was interesting because when I first saw the tell-tale shape of a robotic vacuum cleaner in the lab back in February, I thought that they may have worked on the original product. However, it was not until much later, after working in the same lab as the core team for about 3 weeks, that I was lead to understand that this one was made by another company. The company is FUDA, a long time client of the lab that dominates the vacuum cleaner market in China. Though the form of our robot was not all that different from early birds like the Roomba, it had been completely designed in house and seems not to have been a copy. I think their visual similarity is more likely to be an effort to capitalize on the success of the original.

Despite the mass of work assosiated with this project, it seemed never to really dominate the lab. This may be because our deadline was distant because there was a version already in the market but its effect on the working method was quite noticeable. It was hardly talked about until it was on the verge of completion, at which point we had a press conference with a number of local news companies.

As you may imagine, the team for a project like this is quite large. However, the industrial design group's connection was always very strong. At the moment, for instance, this project is in the hands of electrical engineers in Lab 127 for refinement of the motherboard, but they answer to the design team back in Lab 318 who are in charge of the human interaction so involvement is as high as ever.