Managed a perfect cleaning record, if you leave it in the water long enough. Basket is quite difficult to clean. Must be retrieved with a pole when finished. In an aquatic world dominated by robotic pool cleaners that mostly look identical, a company called iGarden has been that breath of fresh air you take after reaching the water's surface. The company's pool cleaners have always featured designs that feel inspired more by high-end automobiles than underwater janitors, and with the new M1 series, its gear is sportier than ever.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. A massive battery lets this robotic pool cleaner run all day and then some. We'll let you decide if that justifies its sky-high price tag. "Set it and forget it" is something of a moving target in the world of robotic pool cleaners. While a few models have exceptional battery life--a bit more than six hours being about the best I've seen--many die after just a couple of hours in the water, requiring immediate retrieval and recharging.

We present SR WToolkit, an open-source Wizard of Oz toolkit designed to facilitate the rapid prototyping of social robotic avatars powered by local large language models (LLMs). Our web-based toolkit enables multimodal interaction through text input, button-activated speech, and wake-word command. The toolkit offers real-time configuration of avatar appearance, behavior, language, and voice via an intuitive control panel. In contrast to prior works that rely on cloud-based LLMs services, SRWToolkit emphasizes modularity and ensures on-device functionality through local LLM inference. In our small-scale user study, [n = 11] participants created and interacted with diverse robotic roles (hospital receptionist, mathematics teacher, and driving assistant), which demonstrated positive outcomes in the toolkit's usability, trust, and user experience. The toolkit enables rapid and efficient development of robot characters customized to researchers' needs, supporting scalable research in human-robot interaction.

This is a review of two pool robots, one which is the most exceptional cleaning device I've tested to date, and one that's maddeningly frustrating and overly complex. You've probably already figured out the twist: Yes, they are same device, the iGarden Pool Cleaner K60. To start things off, just look at the thing: With its jet-black chassis and orange-trimmed wheels, the machine looks more like a sports car than a glorified leaf sweeper. Despite the evocative look, it still moves about courtesy of large wheels and treads that abut a pair of spinning scrubber. Its biggest selling point is under the hood: A fairly beefy 7500mAh battery powers the 30-pound robot to an epic running time of up to 6 hours, according to iGarden.

Leviton, one of the biggest electrical component manufacturers in the world, makes high-quality products and offers a comprehensive collection of Z-Wave-compatible devices in addition to this Z-Wave 800 dimmer and switch. Smart lighting controls that operate over Wi-Fi are great, because they don't require a hub; they connect directly to your router. The downside is that they must compete with all the other clients on your home network: Your computers, gaming consoles, media streamers, smart speakers, home security cameras, smart plugs, and many, many more. I live in a very small home--less than 800 square feet--but there are still more than 80 devices connected to the Eero 6 router in my Ring Alarm Pro. Given that the Eero 6's practical limit is 128 clients, there just isn't a lot of room for light switches and dimmers.

Generative AI systems are transforming content creation, but their usability remains a key challenge. This paper examines usability factors such as user experience, transparency, control, and cognitive load. Common challenges include unpredictability and difficulties in fine-tuning outputs. We review evaluation metrics like efficiency, learnability, and satisfaction, highlighting best practices from various domains. Improving interpretability, intuitive interfaces, and user feedback can enhance usability, making generative AI more accessible and effective.

Have you ever seen a movie where someone enters a posh home and immediately uses a big control panel to secure their house, turn on their lights, get news updates, and so on? That's essentially what a smart home hub does, and you can get one now at a great price if you want. The Amazon Echo Hub is a central control panel that connects all the smart home devices in your house, and right now it's on sale for just 125 on Amazon. Whether you place it by the door or put it in your bedroom, it doesn't matter because it just works. The Echo Hub's dashboard is customizable, so you can add in your favorite widgets, check in on your smart doorbell camera feed, quickly turn off the smart lights in your living room, send your smart robot vacuum on a cleaning job, or arm your security system.

Mixed Reality (MR) is constantly evolving to inspire new patterns of robot manipulation for more advanced Human- Robot Interaction under the 4th Industrial Revolution Paradigm. Consider that Mixed Reality aims to connect physical and digital worlds to provide special immersive experiences, it is necessary to establish the information exchange platform and robot control systems within the developed MR scenarios. In this work, we mainly present multiple effective motion control methods applied on different interactive robotic arms (e.g., UR5, UR5e, myCobot) for the Unity-based development of MR applications, including GUI control panel, text input control panel, end-effector object dynamic tracking and ROS-Unity digital-twin connection.

There is an increasing consensus about the effectiveness of user-centred approaches in the explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) field. Indeed, the number and complexity of personalised and user-centred approaches to XAI have rapidly grown in recent years. Often, these works have a two-fold objective: (1) proposing novel XAI techniques able to consider the users and (2) assessing the \textit{goodness} of such techniques with respect to others. From these new works, it emerged that user-centred approaches to XAI positively affect the interaction between users and systems. However, so far, the goodness of XAI systems has been measured through indirect measures, such as performance. In this paper, we propose an assessment task to objectively and quantitatively measure the goodness of XAI systems in terms of their \textit{information power}, which we intended as the amount of information the system provides to the users during the interaction. Moreover, we plan to use our task to objectively compare two XAI techniques in a human-robot decision-making task to understand deeper whether user-centred approaches are more informative than classical ones.

Sonos makes some of our favorite speakers and soundbars--we've tested all of them and have yet to find one we dislike. These devices are expensive, but the good news is that Black Friday Sonos deals launched earlier this week and they're still going strong through Cyber Monday. You can snag sales on the company's Bluetooth speakers, soundbars, subwoofers, and more (Roam speakers are on sale until January 6). We've included the best deals below. Updated November 27, 2023: We've updated links and pricing for Cyber Monday.