The Army announced last week that it was refocusing the Future Combat Systems program on aiding infantry units first (about time) rather than on heavy units given the urgent requests from the field for better lower-level equipment. It looks like this is the schedule — a Preliminary Limited User Test will begin this summer in Fort Bliss, Texas, followed by a full-blown Limited User Test in FY’09 (federal fiscal years start Oct. 1). Here is the key sentence: “The formal LUT scheduled in FY09 wil
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This afternoon while I was moving across the vinyl floor with bucket, cleaner and a wash towel in hand, diligently scrubbing away all the dirt/scuffs, I suddenly realized I must have been a spitting image of the tiny cleaning droid “M-O” that obsessively cleans all the “contaminants” from the pristine floors in the wonderful new animated feature, WALL•E. The film certainly appealed to the clean freak in me, with a myriad of robotic cleaning and organizing machines that are orchestrated to wondro
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I finally purchased my own roomba!   I bought the Roomba 550, pretty good deal.  It comes with 3 extra filters, brush cleaner, 2 virtual walls/lighthouses (it has a switch, can work as either one), self charging docking station, and the roomba (with scheduling built in). I set up the dock last night, charged it up, set the schedule (for thursdays), and hit clean to watch it on its first exploration.  It did a pretty good job!  Picked up a lot of dust off the floor and carpets.  Better yet, I d
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The folks at iRobot not only make the Roomba, which will robotically vacuum your floors and drive your dog insane, but also they make military iRobots, which will chase down and, er, vacuum up terrorists, enemy combatants, and other assorted malefactors. I, for one, would not like to see the bad boy pictured on the right chasing me down some hallway or alley. Not every iRobot, however, packs heat, and many perform certain defensive military missions such as handling and disabling IEDs, detectin
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Here’s a new one — a positive Looj review! Some decent videos at the link. thx, Microcapfun Sadly, I think the Looj, at least in its current incarnation, is a bit of a bust. The reviews are in, and the list of shortcomings — a pretty crappy battery, tendency to flip over/get stuck, etc. — make the Looj a sidenote to the iRobot business. Useful to many people, sure, and a large potential market, yep. But not quite there. And it didn’t help that the company hasn’t been able to get the Looj in
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Readers of this blog know that I’ve strongly advocated for iRobot to open up its own retail stores, a la Apple, to better educate consumers about robots for which they have no frame of reference but which seen operating in person would very likely be wowed into impulse buys, particularly around gift-giving time. (The typical mall store may have a Roomba vacuum or Scooba floor washing robot sitting on a shelf, where it looks like a toy in a toy box, instead of the life-improving tools that they a
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