If any company groks the importance of the hacker user base, it's iRobot, makers of the Roomba. Sure, most home owners just want to keep their floors clean, but when iRobot realized that people were buying its vacuum cleaner robots for hobby projects, it embraced the modders and sales rocketed. There's even a Home Robot Forum on the official site.
So the "improved cleaning performance" and anti-allergen filtering of the new 500 series might be interesting to you clean-freaks out there, but what gets us excited is the new modular design, making upgrades and component swap-outs easy, and the Wireless Command Center, which – among other things – allows direct remote control: Tell the kids to clean their rooms and now they might just do it.
The Roomba 560 (pictured) also gains "Virtual Wall Lighthouses", programmable virtual walls which can confine the robot to one room until it is fully cleaned. This works by RF communication, so we assume it orients itself in relation to the base station. Prices range from $250 to $400, and there are all sorts of video demos on the product site.
Press release [iRobot]
Product page [iRobot via Make]
