I was never a fan of extracurricular activities in high school or college, so I surprised even myself when I recently formed the Mozilla Roomba Users Group – a club of home-cleaning-robot enthusiasts. The idea was that interested Roomba owners and spectators at Mozilla would get together and participate in events testing the various skills of the robots. Our first RUG meeting was today, with three of the four members in attendance: myself, osunick, and dolske.
The first event was “function properly”, in which all participating robots were placed on a conference room table and released from slumber to interact with each other. Sadly, osunick’s roomba did not function properly, and had to be disqualified from subsequent events. fligtar and dolske tied for winning the first event, as both of their roombas functioned properly.
The second event was a timed race from one end of the table to the other, knocking a styrofoam section completely off the table. Both robots started off with a straight path, tying at 12 seconds each. The meeting was heating up, with both dolske and fligtar tied with 2 events won.
The last event of this meeting was a synchronized demo race. The first roomba to pass others by more than a second in the recorded demo would emerge victorious. fligtar’s roomba was able to pull ahead of dolske’s midway through the demo to clinch the event and meeting, with 3 events won to dolske’s 2.