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Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, in his study at the President’s House on the Bard College campus in Annandale-on-Hudson.
Leon Botstein has led Bard College for nearly five decades.
Researchers have demonstrated a caterpillar-like soft robot that can move forward, backward, and dip under narrow spaces.
The caterpillar-bot’s movement is driven by a novel pattern of silver nanowires that use heat to control the way the robot bends, allowing users to steer the robot in either direction.
“A caterpillar’s movement is controlled by local curvature of its body—its body curves differently when it pulls itself forward than it does when it pushes itself backward,” says Yong Zhu, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University and corresponding author of a paper on the work.
“We’ve drawn inspiration from the caterpillar’s biomechanics to mimic that local curvature, and use nanowire heaters to control similar curvature and movement in the caterpillar-bot.
“Engineering soft robots that can move in two different directions is a significant challenge in soft robotics,” Zhu says.
“The embedded nanowire heaters allow us to control the movement of the robot in two ways. We can control which sections of the robot bend by controlling the pattern of heating in the soft robot. And we can control the extent to which those sections bend by controlling the amount of heat being applied.”
The caterpillar-bot consists of two layers of polymer, which respond differently when exposed to heat. The bottom layer shrinks, or contracts, when exposed to heat. The top layer expands when exposed to heat. A pattern of silver nanowires is embedded in the expanding layer of polymer. The pattern includes multiple lead points where researchers can apply an electric current. The researchers can control which sections of the nanowire pattern heat up by applying an electric current to different lead points, and can control the amount of heat by applying more or less current.
“We demonstrated that the caterpillar-bot is capable of pulling itself forward and pushing itself backward,” says postdoctoral researcher Shuang Wu, first author of the paper.
“In general, the more current we applied, the faster it would move in either direction. However, we found that there was an optimal cycle, which gave the polymer time to cool—effectively allowing the ‘muscle’ to relax before contracting again. If we tried to cycle the caterpillar-bot too quickly, the body did not have time to ‘relax’ before contracting again, which impaired its movement.”
The researchers also demonstrated that the caterpillar-bot’s movement could be controlled to the point where users were able steer it under a very low gap—similar to guiding the robot to slip under a door. In essence, the researchers could control both forward and backward motion as well as how high the robot bent upwards at any point in that process.
“This approach to driving motion in a soft robot is highly energy efficient, and we’re interested in exploring ways that we could make this process even more efficient,” Zhu says.
“Additional next steps include integrating this approach to soft robot locomotion with sensors or other technologies for use in various applications—such as search-and-rescue devices.”
The paper appears in Science Advances.
Support for the work came from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
Source: NC State
The post Soft robot crawls like a caterpillar appeared first on Futurity.
Lecturers say programs capable of writing competent student coursework threaten academic integrity
An academic paper entitled Chatting and Cheating: Ensuring Academic Integrity in the Era of ChatGPT was published this month in an education journal, describing how artificial intelligence (AI) tools “raise a number of challenges and concerns, particularly in relation to academic honesty and plagiarism”.
What readers – and indeed the peer reviewers who cleared it for publication – did not know was that the paper itself had been written by the controversial AI chatbot ChatGPT.
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Enlarge (credit: Edward Olive/Getty Images)
ChatGPT might well be the most famous, and potentially valuable, algorithm of the moment, but the artificial intelligence techniques used by OpenAI to provide its smarts are neither unique nor secret. Competing projects and open source clones may soon make ChatGPT-style bots available for anyone to copy and reuse.
Stability AI, a startup that has already developed and open-sourced advanced image-generation technology, is working on an open competitor to ChatGPT. “We are a few months from release,” says Emad Mostaque, Stability’s CEO. A number of competing startups, including Anthropic, Cohere, and AI21, are working on proprietary chatbots similar to OpenAI’s bot.
There's a new op-ed in The New York Times from Noam Chomsky and two of his academic colleagues — Dr. Ian Roberts, a linguistics professor at University of Cambridge, and Dr. Jeffrey Watumull, a philosopher who is also the director of artificial intelligence at a tech company. — Read the rest
Wheeled robots can accurately measure the angle of leaves on corn plants in the field, report researchers.
“The angle of a plant’s leaves, relative to its stem, is important because the leaf angle affects how efficient the plant is at performing photosynthesis,” says Lirong Xiang, first author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor of biological and agricultural engineering at North Carolina State University.
“For example, in corn, you want leaves at the top that are relatively vertical, but leaves further down the stalk that are more horizontal. This allows the plant to harvest more sunlight. Researchers who focus on plant breeding monitor this sort of plant architecture because it informs their work.
“However, conventional methods for measuring leaf angles involve measuring leaves by hand with a protractor—which is both time-consuming and labor-intensive,” Xiang says. “We wanted to find a way to automate this process—and we did.”
The new technology—called AngleNet—has two key components: the hardware and the software.
The hardware, in this case, is a robotic device that is mounted on wheels. The device is steered manually, and is narrow enough to navigate between crop rows that are spaced 30 inches apart –the standard width farmers use. The device itself consists of four tiers of cameras, each of which is set to a different height to capture a different level of leaves on the surrounding plants. Each tier includes two cameras, allowing it to capture a stereoscopic view of the leaves and enable 3D modeling of plants.
As the device is steered down a row of plants, it is programmed to capture multiple stereoscopic images, at multiple heights, of every plant it passes.
All of this visual data goes into a software program that then computes the leaf angle for the leaves of each plant at different heights.
“For plant breeders, it’s important to know not only what the leaf angle is, but how far those leaves are above the ground,” Xiang says. “This gives them the information they need to assess the leaf angle distribution for each row of plants. This, in turn, can help them identify genetic lines that have desirable traits—or undesirable traits.”
To test the accuracy of AngleNet, the researchers compared leaf angle measurements done by the robot in a corn field to leaf angle measurements made by hand using conventional techniques.
“We found that the angles measured by AngleNet were within 5 degrees of the angles measured by hand, which is well within the accepted margin of error for purposes of plant breeding,” Xiang says.
“We’re already working with some crop scientists to make use of this technology, and we’re optimistic that more researchers will be interested in adopting the technology to inform their work. Ultimately, our goal is to help expedite plant breeding research that will improve crop yield.”
The paper appears in the Journal of Field Robotics. Coauthors are from Iowa State University and Auburn University. The work had support from the National Science Foundation and the Plant Sciences Institute at Iowa State.
Source: NC State
The post Robot rolls through fields to measure corn leaves appeared first on Futurity.
Researchers have developed technology that would allow a flock of robots to explore subsurface environments on other worlds.
“Lava tubes and caves would make perfect habitats for astronauts because you don’t have to build a structure; you are shielded from harmful cosmic radiation, so all you need to do is make it pretty and cozy,” says Wolfgang Fink, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Arizona.
Fink is lead author of a new paper in Advances in Space Research that details a communication network that would link rovers, lake landers, and even submersible vehicles through a so-called mesh topology network, allowing the machines to work together as a team, independently from human input.
According to Fink and his coauthors, the approach could help address one of NASA’s Space Technology Grand Challenges by helping overcome the limited ability of current technology to safely traverse environments on comets, asteroids, moons, and planetary bodies.
In a nod to the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel,” the researchers named their patent-pending concept the “Breadcrumb-Style Dynamically Deployed Communication Network” paradigm, or DDCN.
“If you remember the book, you know how Hansel and Gretel dropped breadcrumbs to make sure they’d find their way back,” says Fink, founder and director of the Visual and Autonomous Exploration Systems Research Laboratory at Caltech and the University of Arizona. “In our scenario, the ‘breadcrumbs’ are miniaturized sensors that piggyback on the rovers, which deploy the sensors as they traverse a cave or other subsurface environment.”
Continuously monitoring their environment and maintaining awareness of where they are in space, the rovers proceed on their own, connected to each other via a wireless data connection, deploying communication nodes along the way. Once a rover senses the signal is fading but still within range, it drops a communication node, regardless of how much distance has actually passed since it placed the last node.
“One of the new aspects is what we call opportunistic deployment—the idea that you deploy the ‘breadcrumbs’ when you have to and not according to a previously planned schedule,” Fink says.
All the while, there is no need for input from the mother rover; each subordinate rover will make that determination on its own, Fink adds. The system can work in one of two ways, Fink explains. In one, the mother rover acts as a passive recipient, collecting data transmitted by the rovers doing the exploration. In the other, the mother rover acts as the orchestrator, controlling the rovers’ moves like a puppet master.
The new concept dovetails with the tier-scalable reconnaissance paradigm devised by Fink and colleagues in the early 2000s. This idea envisions a team of robots operating at different command levels—for example, an orbiter controlling a blimp, which in turn controls one or more landers or rovers on the ground.
Already, space missions have embraced this concept. For example, on Mars, the Perseverance rover is commanding Ingenuity, a robotic helicopter. A concept for another mission, which ultimately was not selected for funding, proposed sending an orbiter carrying a balloon and a lake lander to study one of the hydrocarbon seas on Saturn’s moon Titan.
The breadcrumb approach takes the idea one step further by providing a robust platform allowing robotic explorers to operate underground or even submerged in liquid environments. Such swarms of individual, autonomous robots could also aid in search and rescue efforts in the wake of natural disasters on Earth, Fink says.
Fink says the biggest challenge, apart from getting the rovers inside the subsurface environment in the first place, is to retrieve the data they record underground and bring it back to the surface. The DDCN concept allows a team of rovers to navigate even convoluted underground environments without ever losing contact to their “mother rover” on the surface. Outfitted with a light detection and ranging system, or lidar, they could even map out cave passages in all three dimensions, not unlike the drones that can be seen exploring an alien spacecraft in the movie Prometheus.
“Once deployed, our sensors automatically establish a nondirected mesh network, which means each node updates itself about each node around it,” says Fink, who first detailed the DDCN concept in a proposal to NASA in 2019.
The new research “has the potential to herald a new age of planetary and astrobiological discoveries.”
“They can switch between each other and compensate for dead spots and signal blackouts,” adds Mark Tarbell, paper coauthor and senior research scientist in Fink’s laboratory. “If some of them die, there still is connectivity through the remaining nodes, so the mother rover never loses connection to the farthest node in the network.”
The robust network of communication nodes ensures all the data collected by the robotic explorers make it back to the mother rover on the surface. Therefore, there is no need to retrieve the robots once they have done their job, says Fink, who published the idea of using groups of expendable mobile robotic surface probes as early as 2014.
“They’re designed to be expendable,” he says. “Instead of wasting resources to get them into the cave and back out, it makes more sense to have them go as far as they possibly can and leave them behind once they have fulfilled their mission, run out of power, or succumbed to a hostile environment.”
“The communication network approach introduced in this new paper has the potential to herald a new age of planetary and astrobiological discoveries,” says Dirk Schulze-Makuch, president of the German Astrobiological Society and author of many publications on extraterrestrial life. “It finally allows us to explore Martian lava tube caves and the subsurface oceans of the icy moons—places where extraterrestrial life might be present.”
The proposed concept “holds magic,” according to Victor Baker, a professor of hydrology and atmospheric sciences, geosciences, and planetary sciences. “The most amazing discoveries in science come about when advances in technology provide both first-time access to a thing or place and the means of communicating what is thereby discovered to creative minds that are seeking understanding,” Baker says.
In places that call for submersible robots, the system could consist of a lander—either floating on a lake, as might be the case on Titan, or sitting on the ice atop a subsurface ocean like on Europa—that is connected to the submarine, for example through a long cable. Here the communication nodes would act as repeaters, boosting the signal in regular intervals to prevent it from degrading.
Importantly, Fink points out, the nodes have the capabilities to gather data themselves—for example measuring pressure, salinity, temperature, and other chemical and physical parameters—and to ingest the data into the cable connecting back to the lander.
“Imagine you make it all the way to Europa, you melt your way through miles of ice, make it down to the subsurface ocean, where you find yourself surrounded by alien life, but you have no way of getting data back to the surface,” he says. “That’s the scenario we need to avoid.”
Having developed the rovers and the communication technology, Fink’s group is now working on building the actual mechanism by which the rovers would deploy the communication nodes.
“Basically, we’re going to teach our ‘Hansels’ and ‘Gretels’ how to drop the breadcrumbs so they add up to a functioning mesh communication network,” Fink says.
Source: University of Arizona
The post Robots on Mars could steal a trick from Hansel and Gretel appeared first on Futurity.
Robot vacuums are one of the few sci-fi predictions that more or less delivered — there actually are autonomous machines that can help keep your home clean. We've tested over a dozen robot vacs, and right now our top recommendation for a budget dirt sucker, iRobot's Roomba 694, is $95 off both at Amazon and through iRobot's site. Usually $275, the 694 is just $179 right now, which matches the all time low it dropped to a few times previously. The deal is part of a wider robot vacuum sale with discounts ranging up to $300, depending on which model you pick. If you've been thinking of adding one of these smart devices to your life, this might be a good time to snap one up.
In our tests, the 694 proved itself by being both a powerful cleaner and offering an app that's easy to use — even for robot vacuum newbies. You can set schedules to have the bot clean on regular intervals and it can handle both tiled or carpeted surfaces. We found that it roved around cleaning for around 45 minutes before returning itself to the dock for a recharge, which was plenty of time to maintain an apartment, but may need to a pit stop before it can cover a larger house. Unless it tries to suck up an errant cord, you'll likely only need to interact with it to empty the dirt collection tray. That's something you may need to do every couple days or more often, depending on whether or not you have pets or a lot of tracked-in dirt.
If you'd rather not empty your vac quite so often, you can pick up one that empties itself, like the Roomba s9+. We named this the best premium robot vacuum in our guide and were impressed with both its suction power and navigation abilities. It usually comes with a steep $999 price tag but the sale knocks $200 off the list price, which makes it a little more affordable.
For homes with smooth surfaces that could use a wipe down, a hybrid model could be what you're looking for. The Roomba Combo j7+ combines mop and vacuum functions and is $250 off during the sale, bringing the $1,099 unit down to $849. One of our editors used the j7+ in his home for several weeks, and while the initial mapping runs were a bit of a hassle and the noise of the unit emptying into the clean base was loud, he was impressed with the bot's learning capabilities and the fact that it made a noticeable difference in the general cleanliness of his floors.
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Budget robot vacuums
Budget robot vacuums
Robot Spirit Guide is GPT put to work on religious guidance.
I've seen it all, and want to share my knowledge with you. Ask me any question, and I'll consult the supernatural below.
I'll stick with my OMM 0000 confessional elizabooth, thank you. — Read the rest
There's a great quote by the Irish revolutionary James Connolly about the true power of capitalism:
— Read the restApologists for capitalism claim that the profits of capitalists are the reward for their brains and skill, but here we observe the profits are reaped by those who bring neither brains, skill, nor technical knowledge – nothing but cash to purchase the brains and muscle of others.
A group of scientists just created a mobile cybernetic entity using robotics and the manipulated muscle mass of a dead animal. Neat! Here's the abstract from the paper, titled "Remote control of muscle-driven miniature robots with battery-free wireless optoelectronics," which was recently published in the journal Science Robotics:
— Read the restBioengineering approaches that combine living cellular components with three-dimensional scaffolds to generate motion can be used to develop a new generation of miniature robots.
Boston Dynamics' Atlas humanoid robot has a bunch of new skills, such as the ability to pick up and arrange wood planks, toss heavy objects, jump around on a scaffolding, and land a perfect backflip. I, for one, will run like hell from our new robotic overlords. — Read the rest
We all could use a little help keeping our homes clean, and now we live in an age where robots are actually capable of lending a (mechanical) hand. Robot vacuums are some of the most ubiquitous smart home gadgets available today with their circular shapes and propensity for bumping into walls. While they provide an undeniable convenience, they can also be expensive. It’s not unheard of to drop close to $1,000 on a high-end robot vacuum cleaner. However, today there are now plenty of budget robot vacuum options to choose from. At Engadget, we consider anything under $300 to be cheap in this space and you may be surprised to see how many there are at that price point. And if you’re new to the world of robot vacuums, you may find that one of these budget gadgets does everything you expected and more, without sacrificing cleaning performance.
Friends and family often ask me if new gadgets are “worth it,” and when it comes to robot vacuums the answer is yes. The most important thing they have going for them is autonomy: Just turn it on, walk away. If you’re someone who wants to spend as little time as possible cleaning your home — or just someone who detests vacuuming — a semi-autonomous robotic vacuum is a great investment.
There are plenty of other good things about them, but before we dive in let’s consider the biggest trade-offs: less power, less capacity and less flexibility. Those first two go hand in hand; robot vacuum cleaners are much smaller than upright vacuums, which leads to less powerful suction. They also hold less dirt because their built-in bins are a fraction of the size of a standard vacuum canister or bag. And while robo-vacs are cord-free, that means they are slaves to their batteries and will require regular recharging.
When it comes to flexibility, robot vacuums do things differently than standard ones. You can control some with your smartphone, set cleaning schedules and more, but robo-vacs are primarily tasked with cleaning floors. On the flip side, their upright counterparts can come with various attachments that let you clean couches, stairs, light fixtures and other hard-to-reach places.
When looking for the best budget robot vacuum, one of the first things you should consider is WiFi connectivity. While you may think that’s a given on all smart home devices, it’s not. Some of the most affordable modes don’t have the option to connect to your home WiFi network. If you choose a robot vac like this, you won’t be able to control it with a smartphone app or with voice commands. Another feature that’s typically reserved for WiFi-connected robots is scheduling because most of them use a mobile app to set cleaning schedules.
But WiFi-incapable vacuums usually come with remote controls that have all the basic functions that companion mobile apps do, including start, stop and return to dock. And if you’re concerned about the possibility of hacking, a robot vac with no access to your WiFi network is the best option.
You should also think about the floors in your home. Do you have mostly carpet, tile, laminate, hardwood? Carpets demand vacuums with more suction power that can collect debris that gets pushed down into nooks and crannies. Unfortunately, there isn’t a universal metric by which suction is measured. Some companies provide Pascal (Pa) levels and generally the higher the Pa, the stronger. But other companies don’t rely on Pa levels and simply say their robots have X-times more suction power than other robot vacuums.
So how can you ensure you’re getting the best robot vacuum to clean your floor type? Read the product description. Look for details about its ability to clean bare floors and carpets, and see if it has a “max” mode you can use to increase suction. If you are given a Pa measurement, look for around 2000Pa if you have mostly carpeted floors.
Size is also important for two reasons: clearance and dirt storage. Check the specs for the robot’s height to see if it can get underneath the furniture you have in your home. Most robo-vacs won’t be able to clean under a couch (unless it’s a very tall, very strange couch), but some can get under entryway tables, nightstands and the like. As for dirt storage, look out for the milliliter capacity of the robot’s dustbin — the bigger the capacity, the more dirt the vacuum cleaner can collect before you have to empty it.
Object detection and cliff sensors are other key features to look out for. The former helps the robot vacuum navigate around furniture while it cleans, rather than mindlessly pushing its way into it. Meanwhile, cliff sensors prevent robot vacuums from tumbling down the stairs, making them the best vacuum for multi-level homes.
Both iRobot and Shark impressed with their affordable robo-vacs. But we think iRobot’s Roomba 694 will be the best budget robot vacuum cleaner for most people thanks to its good cleaning power and easy-to-use mobile app. The Roomba 694 replaced the Roomba 675 last year but, aside from an updated exterior, it’s fundamentally the same vacuum. It looks much sleeker now with its new all-black design, giving it an aesthetic similar to some of the more expensive Roomba models. It has three physical buttons on it — start, dock and spot — and it connects to WiFi so you can control it via the iRobot app. Unfortunately, your $274 gets you the vacuum and its necessary parts only so you’ll have to pay up immediately when you need a replacement filter or brushes.
Setting up the Roomba 694 is straightforward: Open the companion app and follow the instructions. Once it’s connected to your home WiFi network, you’re able to use the app to control the vacuum whenever you don’t feel like using the physical buttons. However, the spot-clean function is only available as a button, which is a bit of a bummer.
iRobot’s app is one of the biggest selling points for any Roomba. It’s so easy to use that even someone with no prior experience will be able to quickly master the robot’s basic functions. iRobot’s app puts most pertinent controls on the homepage, so you rarely (if ever) need to navigate through its menu to do things like set a cleaning schedule.
We recommend setting cleaning schedules to really get the most out of the device. After all, these are semi-autonomous robots, so why not make it so you rarely have to interact with them? Doing so will ensure the Roomba runs through your home on a regular basis, so you’re always left with clean floors. The Roomba 694 in particular did a good job sucking up dirt and debris on my carpets as well as the tile flooring in my kitchen and bathrooms. The only thing I try to do before a cleaning job is get charging cables off of the floor – the Roomba will stop if it sucks something like that up and it’s relatively easy to extract a cable from the machine’s brushes, but I’d rather not have to do so if I can avoid it.
When it comes to battery life, the Roomba 694 ran for around 45 minutes before needing to dock and recharge. iRobot says run times will vary based on floor surfaces, but the 694 is estimated to have a 90-minute battery life when cleaning hardwood floors. While 45 minutes may be enough time for the robot to scuttle around most rooms in my apartment, those with larger homes may have to wait for it to recharge in order to clean everywhere.
iRobot has made a name for itself in the autonomous vacuum market for good reason. Its machines are polished, dead simple to use and the accompanying app is excellent. That ease of use (and the reputation of the iRobot name) comes with a slightly higher asking price, which many will be willing to pay. But there are plenty of solid options now that didn’t exist even just three years ago.
The Shark RV765 is the updated version of the RV761 that we previously recommended. Like the Roomba 694, the Shark RV765 has a slightly different design and a longer run time than the RV761, but otherwise they’re the same vacuum. You can still find the RV761, but it’s a little difficult to do so now that the latest model is available. Although we haven’t tested the RV765, we feel comfortable recommending it since we found the previous version to be a great affordable robot vacuum.
One thing that the RV765 fixes about the previous version is the latter’s ugly bowling-shirt design. The new model nixes that and opts for a sleeker, all-black look with three buttons for docking, cleaning and max mode. You could rely just on the buttons, but it also connects to WiFi so you can use the Shark Clean app. As for the longer run time, that’s just a bonus. The RV761 ran for about 90 minutes before needing to recharge, which was plenty of time for it to clean my two-bedroom apartment. The additional 30 minutes of battery life on the RV765 should allow it to clean larger spaces more efficiently.
Some other things we liked about the RV761 include its spot-clean feature; adjustable wheels, which raise and lower automatically depending on the “terrain” and the obstacles in its path; and its intuitive companion app that allows you to start and stop cleaning jobs, set schedules and more.
Anker’s $230 Eufy RoboVac 11S was one of the cheapest vacuums I tested but it also proved to be one of the most versatile. First thing to note: This robot vacuum doesn’t have WiFi, but it does come with a remote that gives you most of the functions and smart features you’d find in an app (including a schedule feature). Eufy also includes additional brushes and filters in the box.
The “S” in this robot’s name stands for slim, and it’s roughly half an inch thinner than all of the other vacuums I tested. Not only does this make the 11S lighter, but it was the only one that could clean under my entryway table. The 11S has a physical on-off toggle on its underside plus one button on its top that you can press to start a cleaning. It always begins in auto mode, which optimizes the cleaning process as it putters around your home, but you can use the remote to select a specific cleaning mode like spot and edge clean.
The 11S has three power modes — Standard, BoostIQ and Max — and I kept mine on BoostIQ most of the time. It provided enough suction to adequately clean my carpeted floors, missing only a few crumbs or pieces of debris in corners or tight spaces around furniture. It ran for roughly one hour and 15 minutes when in BoostIQ mode and it has remarkable collision avoidance. Sure, it bumped into walls and some large pieces of furniture, but it was the only budget vac I tried that consistently avoided my cat’s play tunnel that lives in the middle of our living room floor.
As far as noise levels go, you can definitely hear the difference between BoostIQ and Max, but none of the three settings is offensively loud. In fact, I could barely hear the 11S when it was on the opposite end of my apartment running in BoostIQ mode. Thankfully, error alert beeps were loud enough to let me know when something went awry, like the 11S accidentally getting tripped up by a rogue charging cable (which only happened a couple of times and neither robot nor cable were harmed in the process).
Overall, the Eufy RoboVac 11S impressed me with its smarts, despite its lack of WiFi. The lack of wireless connectivity is arguably the worst thing about the robot and that’s saying a lot. It’s worth mentioning that this model is rated for up to 1300Pa suction, but you can grab the next model up, the RoboVac 11S Max, which gives you 2000Pa suction (just know that it’ll likely be louder as a result). But you can’t argue with the value of the $230 11S — especially when you can often find it on sale for $160 or less.
At this point, though, the 11S is a few years old, so you could grab either the Robovac G20 or G30 if you want something comparable but a bit newer. Both come in hybrid versions, which means you’ll get a robot vacuum and mop in one. The differences between the G20 and G30 series are minor, and we recommend getting the $300 G20 Hybrid if you’re just looking for a Eufy machine with some of the latest technology, but don’t want to spend a ton. It has 2500Pa of suction power, dynamic navigation and WiFi connectivity with support for Alexa and Google Assistant voice commands.
The $370 G30 Hybrid, on the other hand, is a slight step up from that. It’s also a WiFi-connected machine with vacuum and mop capabilities, but it includes Smart Dynamic Navigation 2.0, a slightly longer battery life and it comes with boundary strips with which you can set no-go zones (the G20 Hybrid supports this feature, but you’ll have to buy the strips separately).
Budget robot vacuums
Budget robot vacuums
When you’re a college professor, you follow a different calendar from the rest of the grown-up world. There’s school and there’s summer, and that’s how you plot your time. Of course, a global pandemic wreaks havoc on this calendar. But usually, somewhere about now I stop thinking about the previous academic year and start looking ahead to the next one. My New Year begins on July 1, not January 1.
Since I’m closing the books on the 2019-2020 school year, I wanted to remind myself of all the projects I put out into the world during this time. Here in one place are all the critical-creative digital works I released in the past 12 months. I’ll write more about many of these projects later, so right now a blurb for each will have to suffice. Hopefully that’s enough to pique your interest…
Log (October 2019) – imagines what a Ring “smart” doorbell cam might see on a Halloween night Log, this version imagines what a Ring camera might see during an early day of the coronavirus quarantineIn general I was working in one of two modes for each project: procedural generation or interactive fiction. The former hopes to surprise readers with serendipitous juxtapositions and combinations, the latter hopes to entice readers with narrative impact. Whether I succeed at either is a question I’ll leave to others.
FreshRSS 
