The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: February 5, 2012

Official News page 2


MY LIFE WITH A CLEANING DROID

by Hazed

Last week I told you I had bought a cleaning droid of my very own, in the form of the Roomba - a robot vacuum cleaner from robotics firm iRobot.

First impressions were favorable: it looks smart and compact, and its black and silver casing is suitably futuristic. It comes with a docking station which plugs into a power socket, so the robot can charge itself up, and I had to let it suck up power for a while before it was ready to go.

When it was charged, I pressed the CLEAN button and it sprang into action! I watched in fascination as it trundled around, taking a seemingly random path with many inexplicable changes of direction, sometimes spinning on the spot before heading out to cover another part of the floor.

So how good is it? Well, before buying it I read some reviews and most people said that it was OK at cleaning but not brilliant, and that they still had to go round with a manual vacuum cleaner every once in a while to do a thorough job.

But I reckoned that a machine that did a half-assed job would be a lot better than me not doing the cleaning at all!

And I was mostly right.

The good news is that it is such fun. I watch it in fascination as it crawls around the place, tracking and backtracking in order to cover every inch of the dirty floor. I find myself talking to it, urging it on, giving it encouragement and praise, even though I know it doesn't hear me, let alone understand me.

But there are problems, mainly to do with the fact that the Roomba doesn't really get on with my taste in interior design.

My flat has laminated flooring, with rugs everywhere - some large rugs that are heavy enough not to move, and some small sheepskin and goatskin rugs with long shaggy fur which slip all over the place.

Roomba is fine on the hard flooring, and even better on the heavy fixed rugs. But it falls down on the transitions between the two - when it's finished its work it leaves a line of dust around the edges of the rugs which I have to clean up manually.

And it can't cope with the sheep/goatskins at all. It just tries to suck up the long hairs, and then pulls the rugs along with it. Hopeless! I have to pick them up out of its way before telling it to get to work.

Roomba also manages to get stuck in several places - under my desk where there's a rat's nest of cables, and under a chair where it gets stranded on top of some wooden struts. When that happens, it gives a plaintive beep and asks for help, so I have to pick it up and move it away from the problem area.

The frustrating thing is that Roomba has no memory. If it did, it could learn that certain areas are dangerous, and keep away from them - but no, it keeps on returning to the places where it gets stuck, again and again. That's when my words of encouragement turn to exasperated scolding.

So I would recommend it for anyone whose decor is more conventional than mine - wall to wall carpet, or hard floors with no rugs - but personally I am disappointed. I guess all those science fiction robocleaners led me to expect much more, but sadly the technology isn't quite there yet.


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