With friends coming to town this weekend, I desperately needed to vacuum, but I didn’t really want to do it. Being the nerd I am, this seemed like the perfect
time to borrow my coworker’s new robotic vacuum cleaner, the Roomba and try to convince my wife that this was the next life-changing gadget after TiVo.

I got the unit all packed in the box, so I got to pretend I just bought it. One of the pieces of paper in the box is a letter from the president of iRobot corporation. It starts, “Welcome to the iRobot Revolution!” Hmm, hasn’t there been a lot of movies about robot revolutions? As I recall, none of them turned out very well. Hopefully this Roomba won’t go renegade on me.

It’s kind of funny that they call it a ‘robotic’ vacuum cleaner. When dishwashers first came out, did they call them ‘robotic dish washers’? I bet some day my kids will be agast when I tell them you actually had to push vacuum cleaners around the house in the olden days.

I took it out of the box and plopped it down in the middle of the living room floor after clearing out some furniture. The cat came over to check it out and sniffed it a bit. He didn’t seem to mind it – yet.

Using the remote, I turned it on, set it on ‘Max’ (vacuum ’till you drop) and let it rip. It instantly came to life with some enthusiastic beeps and started in a spiral pattern around the living room. The cat was terrified, yet fascinated. His tail was huge. He couldn’t help but follow it around and yell at it when it happened to head in his direction.

The first thing I noticed about the patterns that it followsis that it’s not very efficient. When people vacuum, we tend to go in straight lines. The Roomba likes its spirally pattern, then gets bored with it and goes straight for a little while. It leaves these interesting crop circle-like patterns in the carpet. When it bumps into something it turns, and tends to do a reasonably good job at following walls. I guess the Roomba doesn’t need to be so efficient because it’s a lot more patient than humans. It will vacuum for as long as it has juice.

The thing is pretty noisy, but it seems to do a good job picking stuff up. A few seconds after it started up, it got stuck underneath the heating unit. It was just the right height for it to wedge itself under there. I freed it quickly and sent it on its way.

It worked on the living room for a little while, then wandered into the hallway, and then a quick tour of the study. It apparently didn’t think that room was very dirty because it made a few runs, then headed back down the hallway and into the living room again. Later it bumped back into the hallway and into the bedroom. One really cool thing was seeing it vacuum all the way under the bed. That’s something you just can’t do easily with a regular vacuum.

It ended up back in the living room again, then headed into the dining room.
The cat is still stalking it, but his tail is a little more normal size now. It just got stuck on the bottom of of my chair. It strugged for a bit and grinded (I hoped it wasn’t scraping the wood), then stopped with a sound that sounded like a robotic “Uh-oh”. I picked it up with no damage done, gave it a reassuring pat, it started it up again.

It’s fun to watch it scoot under bookcases. Oops, it just got stuck on the border of the carpet into the closet. I guess it’s a matter of learning where it has trouble and blocking off those areas. Hmm, somehow I imagined my robots being smarter than that. It just got itself under and end table and got frustrated trying to find a way out without bumping into any legs, but eventually it succeeded.

A half hour into its tour of the house, it still hasn’t entered the guest bedroom, so I stopped it before the batteries went dead, put it in the bedroom and closed the door. Here I am watching my robotic vacuum, posting to my blog on my laptop over a wireless internet connection. I’m truly living in the future.

A little while later, it finally ran out of juice, stopped and periodically made some beeps so I’d know where to find it. I grabbed it and plugged it in to charge. I was confused when the battery indicator pulsed when I inserted the plug into the Roomba, but before I plugged the other end into the wall. Oh well.

Roomba cleans like a classic procrastinator. It will do part of a room, get bored, then work on another room until it gets bored with that one, then head back to a room it already worked on. I just hope the battery lasts long enough that it gets the whole house done. I don’t want to have to do touch-up jobs where the Roomba missed. It clearly doesn’t seem to be making any sort of map of the house, it’s just going where it can and turning if it bumps into stuff. It tends to enter a room the same way and clean mostly the same areas. Hopefully with enough entopy, it will eventually cover everything. It would be fun to attach a GPS to this thing and capture its travels around my house.

The Pro Elite comes with remote you can use to drive it manually if you want or start or stop it. It’s also easier than trying to track it down to stop it, not that it goes very fast.

It seems pretty sturdy, but I don’t really want to know what would happen if I accidentally stepped on it. It’s got two really knobby tires underneath. By moving them in opposite directions, it can achieve a zero-degree turning radius. A third wheel in front is on a spring, so when you pick it up, it immediately stops. The spring is also activated when it encounters a cliff like a top stair, so it doesn’t plunge itself off the edge. Instead, it just turns around. Smart.

It’s definitely the kind of thing you’d just want to start when you leave for work the morning to avoid the noise and the hassle of dodging it when it wanders over to wherever you happen to be in the house. It’s not the fastest way to vacuum for sure, but with so little effort involved, I’d definitely ‘do’ it more often. Right now, we only really vacuum when people are coming over. The only problem with this scheme is that if I automate the vacuum cleaning, my wife will delegate another chore to me. Sigh.

Well, my soiree with the Roomba is over. Tomorrow I have to give it back to my coworker or I think his wife will go into Roomba withdrawal.

MY Roomba is on my Amazon wishlist right now. Won’t you please bring it home?