i have another question for those LG roboking owners or sellers.
From my understanding, it has a mop function, so my question is:
1) Can it sweep+vacuum+mop at the same time? Or it can only do sweep+vacuum or mop only separately?
I don't have Roboking, but I've personally seen it in action at my Scooba customer's home, he's Ang Moh & very willing to buy overseas things without warranty. Anyway he's rich & can afford to junk things if they become lemon.
The "mop" is a crescent shape micro fibre cloth, which is attached below Roboking's tail underside. So Roboking will sweep & vacuum debris, followed by the micro fibre cloth wiping of floor.
I believe this micro fibre cloth is intended to be used dry or moist, but won't be constantly moisten by reservoir of water like that of Mint Plus.
I'm not sure if Roboking is ever intended to be used on wet floor, considering it's using a 1" Red beam tracking system similar to a giant Optical Mouse. Moist floor will have reflection which will later dry up & look different.
Logically speaking, I believe this Optical Mouse thingy is just for counting steps & speed regulation, I cannot imagine Roboking have the processing power to piece together floor grain pattern in 1" strip for the entire house.
Analogy: take a handheld scanner (a REALLY pathetic one) with 1" scanning width, now scan ur entire house in U-turn fashion, store all that info in ur PC, then use Jigsaw puzzle & arrange all these captured images into a full floor plan of ur home.
Then... here comes the best part... identify a particular X-Y coordinate on ur floor simply by matching a 1" square which I'm gonna show u.
Sounds impossible? Yes, I believe only "Deep Blue" can do it.
So then how does Roboking do it's tracking? The answer is probably the top camera which films (or takes interval snapshots) of the ceiling, where Machine Vision algorithm will identify light fixtures (assuming well lit) as marker points (like Celestial navigation).
I did a Machine Vision software project during my schooling days, where I wrote a program (using pre-written algorithms) to trace outlines of objects found in any photo, eg. given a photo of a box, a plate & maybe a cheese wedge, the program can give the dimension/position of the said items. Such is for Robotics application & developing Iron Man type missiles.
The one thing that puzzles me, can Roboking navigate under low or no lighting? What if parts of the ceiling is twice as high while some parts are extra low, eg. a home with some false ceiling, a see through stairway.
Something like this:
http://www.asiahomes.com/images/11twhse_carpark.jpg
I'm almost certain Roboking doesn't come with Stereoscopic camera, so how does it translate 3D objects into a 2D mapping? A very very powerful computer is required to interprete a video footage & create a 3D wire frame from there.
So this brings me to the next conclusion, Roboking doesn't map the ceiling to that complexity, but rather just marker points, ie. anything brighter than a certain threshold will become white, anything darker will become black.
Then with a Black/White bitmap, it finds it's orientation.
Those who play with Photoshop Contrast settings will know what I mean.
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