HomeR (1993) by Frank Jenkins, JRL Consulting, Menlo Park, CA. The home robot vacuum cleaner.
"Homer will navigate with 12 ultrasonic sonar units and 24 light-level sensors. The sonars bounce inaudible sound pulses off the surroundings and gauge distances to objects by clocking the echoes of the pulses. The light-level sensors act in unison as a crude panoramic camera. In addition, built-in odometers will tell Homer how far it's rolled, and four extra sonars, along with infrared sensors, will spot nearby obstacles. … Homer Hoover no longer requires that a human being be there to operate it. The vacuum cleaner will ultimately be able to vacuum the house and plug itself back in all through computer programming. Jenkins hopes also to build in a feature so that if Homer Hoover accidentally picked up a sock or the family cat, it would spit it out and vacuum around it." – "Robot Vacuums" by Gregory T. Pope, Discover Magazine, March 1993.
"Frank Jenkins, an American inventor and computer programmer, was a member of a small group of robotics enthusiasts in northern California at the time he built his "HomeR Hoover” robot. Frank's colleagues were impressed when he demonstrated his attractive robot at a meeting of the group. So was Discover magazine, reporting on the robot in 1993. Standing two feet tall, 1.3 feet wide, and weighing 44 pounds, HomeR was a truncated pyramid hosting 80-plus sensors of various sorts. Jenkins liberated components from two different Black & Decker vacuums to construct HomeR's cleaning mechanism. When vacuuming finished, HomeR's sensors and software enabled the robot to return to its charging station and refresh its batteries. Comparative performance details are lacking, but from appearances, built-on-a-shoestring HomeR seems no less capable than the robot vacuums developed by corporate giants of the era. But, mirroring his larger counterparts, Jenkins' HomeR never found the entrance to the marketplace." – Dancing with Roomba, Joseph L. Jones.
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