Trend Watch: Roomba as Art?

You've all seen the commercials, and many of you either have one or know someone who has one: the Roomba. Roomba is a vacuuming disc-shaped robot that moves around your floor picking up dust and dirt. It does carpets and hardwood, and even cleans while you're out running errands. It's kind of like having your very own Rosie from The Jetsons. I've used one, actually it was a knock-off, but it really does work! Now, I know that the Roomba creates clean floors, but did you know it also created art? Me neither, until I stumbled on the Flickr Roomba Art Pool, a user-created community dedicated to the tiny robotic Picasso!

I wanted to delve deeper into this strange and wondrous world of long-exposure photography and the little battery-powered robot appliance, so I contacted a few of the Roomba artists to find out more.

Check out more great Roomba light paintings after the jump.

I first spoke with Peter, or zim2411, about his gallery. I asked him how he even found out about this Roomba photography phenomenon. He explained that he enjoys long exposure photography and experimented with taking 30-plus minute photographs of the night sky. He was lucky enough to receive a Roomba from his sister and noticed the LED light on the top. When the battery is fully charged, it glows green, but as the charge wears, it changes from orange to red. "I thought this would make for a neat photo, so I setup my camera and tried it out," he says.

I asked Peter why he thought that the Roomba and its movement is so fascinating. "The Roomba kind of works in mysterious ways. Later models attempt to virtually map the room and try and remember where they have been, but mine does not," he says. He likes how his Roomba moves in an "organized chaos" sort of way, and yet leaves the room clean. He says that in the gallery you can see where the Roomba collides with baseboards and furniture legs. "The viewer is just as disoriented as the Roomba and can only rely on the Roomba's light trail to find where objects are in the photo," he says.

Another contributor is Tod, or todbot, who believes that people become attached to their Roombas, almost like pets. He thinks that people are creating these gallery "to try to understand the Roomba," even though "it turns out the algorithm used in the Roomba is fairly simple, made up of many small 'desires' that when summed up create seemingly complex behavior," he says.

Tod's gallery of the Roomba are not light gallery but rather drawings (below). He told me that he created a marker mount for the Roomba, added a Bluetooth interface and then wired writing software running on a laptop so that the Roomba could be controlled remotely. He used it to make a number of different patterns, but it was all done to research the Roomba for his book that came out a few years ago Hacking Roomba.