IBM uses Roomba robots to control temperature in data centers

In addition to Roomba vacuum cleaners and military robots, iRobot also sells “designers” oriented to students and experimenters for creating programmable robots. iRobot Create - the same vacuum cleaner, only without brushes and dust collector, but with a set of connectors for programming and connecting user devices. Many interesting projects were created on this platform. IBM has adapted such robots for continuous monitoring of temperature and humidity in data centers. Knowing where and when it is too hot or cold is critical in order for the data center to work reliably and economically. To dot the entire area with stationary sensors is too expensive and cumbersome, so the measurements were periodically made manually with the help of mobile equipment.



Small autonomous robots, equipped with the necessary set of sensors, make it easier and cheaper to find problem areas where the equipment suffers from overheating, or vice versa, cold air is wasted. The Roomba platform has a netbook and a two-meter pole with sensors at different levels and a webcam. Moving around the premises, the robot makes a map of cold and hot areas, on the basis of which the optimal condition of the air conditioning system is calculated. In 2010, a very similar approach was used in the Indian division of EMC, but it didn’t go further than creating an exhibition prototype.
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Now there are already nine such robots in IBM data centers. According to IBM engineer Jonathan Lenchner, there will be even more of them within a year. In addition to temperature measurements, robots can read RFID tags from servers and routers. Such a “continuous inventory” allows you not to get lost in the complex farm of a large data center and always know exactly in which room and in which rack each device is located.