[jyl]

A few weeks ago, I watched an episode of "America's Test Kitchen" in which they gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up to the iRobot automatic vacuum cleaner. ATK's testing is pretty credible to me, so this got my attention.

Then we stayed with some friends who have two of the Rhoombas working in their house and auxiliary building. I watched the robots work and noticed that, although my friends are unenthusiastic housekeepers, their floors were nicely clean.

When my wife saw the Rhoomba 550 at Costco, we decided to give modern feudalism a try. For $280 we now have our own robotic peasant slaving away on the ground floor of the jyl estate.

My 13 y/o got the job of reading the manual and setting up "Robbie". I programmed the robot to vacuum every day at midnight. My son amuses himself by commanding Robbie to work during the day as well. There are no days off. It is a merciless existence for our robotic slave.

So far, we are quite pleased with his work. The layout here is challenging, with lots of furniture looming, chair forests, cul-de-sacs, and other traps and obstacles. Robbie so far has about a 80% track record of finding his way home to his recharging dock before his batteries give out. We've twice had to rescue him from box canyons and place him back on his dock. Each time he runs, he fills his bin with dust, lint, dirt, cat hair, and other schmutz. Apparently we are not as un-slovenly as we thought. He's remarkably gentle with things in his path, and the cats are learning to ignore the intruder.

Bottom-line, the ground floor now gets vacuumed every day, and it takes me less than a minute each time (emptying the bin, maybe replacing the robot on his dock). I can live with this.

FYI, for the curious, here's how these things work. The robot's movement is mostly random. It might vacuum the dining room, the living room, the foyer, etc, it is all up to chance. It has some preprogrammed behavior to work its way around obstacles, will spiral around particularly dirty spots, can detect large obstacles well enough to slow down before bumping them, and knows not to leap off cliffs - stairs, if you will. When the battery runs low, the robot starts looking for the infrared light on its dock; if it repeatedly runs out of battery before reaching the dock, it starts looking for home a bit earlier. Basically, think of how a beetle moves, blindly guided by its feelers, and that's a Rhoomba.