Roomba Ballet

What do our appliances do when we're not looking? For SQM: The Quantified Home, Space Caviar's exhibition at Biennale Interieur in Kortrijk, the answer was a waltz: twelve iRobot Roombas dancing in the gym of the abandoned Broel School.

Tracking systems were out of budget, so I went open-loop. Custom Arduino boards plugged into each Roomba's hidden serial port, drew power from its 12-volt regulator, and played back pre-recorded moves over iRobot's SCI protocol. An infrared remote broadcast a countdown so all twelve started on the same beat.

Open-loop means drift: Roombas slip on dust and wheel friction. I designed symmetrical moves that cancel out each robot's bias, ran a calibration every day of the show to adjust each robot's profile, and sorted the fleet into three reliability tiers, giving the hardest parts to the most dependable dancers.

The ballet ran several times a day for the whole Biennale Interieur, and Domus later interviewed me about how it was made.