iRobot Rhoomba
 

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.

Hmm..... One would probably keep my place spotless.....

The head of iRobot is the younger brother of one of my high school friends.

I have one, and like it. You do need to clean the brushes often, and once in a while take it apart with a screwdriver to get the hair/fur that does get stuck inside it around the "whisker sweeper". I named mine "Rosie" after the Jetson's robot maid. Their website is irobot.com

Nice writeup! I just picked up a 550 at Costco, too. I have one for the garage, and it runs nearly every day. The 550 runs every other day. I've tossed 4 of them recently - if you don't run them often, the battery goes quickly. The ones I tossed were a few years old, and very noisy compared to the 550.

I don't see a 550 anymore, why do they have 6 different versions, and what's te difference?

Do they set of motion detectors? (no not you Motion)

Bob James

Not sure about the models. I think some have HEPA filters. I'm not sure how real the differences are.

They make floor mopping bots too.

I wish they made a lawn mowing bot.

Speaking of mopping bots, I bought a Mint recently. It uses Swifter pads. Total crap. The pads would be dirty and dry after 10 minutes.... time to change to a new one. Mopping your floor would be a constant babysitting exercise.

Our Roomba gets a good workout every day as one of our dogs is a Siberian Husky. Lots of fur. Not a perfect cleaning job, but for that we break out the Dyson. Ours is named Fast Twitch.

I have one as well. I spend a lot of time cleaning hair out of it.

Looks like iRobot has an API and encourages hobbyists to reprogram their Rhoombas. Cool.

I wish the machine had more sensing ability, even the ability to learn the house's layout. Oh well, I'm guessing there is only about $60-80 of parts in it, and the battery and motors have to be a decent chunk of that.

For those who have them, I'd like to ask how you think one would do for our place. We have wood flooring with area rugs up to maybe 3/4 in. thick and some tile in the kitchen & baths. How do they do with area rugs? I imagine it would be OK if they just went around them & we vacuumed the rugs on a regular basis. The thing is our floors are easy to keep clean & I've never been sure it would be worth getting one. Thoughts?

girl i knew had a pair of them running together. took that to keep up with all the golden retriever fur in her place.

she said it was worth it.

Picked up a Roomba at a garage sale for $10 a few weeks ago. I love it. It's been dubbed "Mouse," after the mouse droids in Star Wars.

Stop shedding!

that company has a pretty good TV commercial.

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I have one. I like it. My cat won't do this:

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I have one and found it to be a complete disappointment. I had to follow it around to make sure it wouldn't get stuck under furniture, which happened frequently. It would also get caught on our area rug and jam. The sensor that prevented it from falling down stairs was also hit or miss. It would frequently get to the edge of our stairs, stop, and start beeping.

All in all, our house just isn't set up to be Roomba friendly. Comparatively it's much easier and faster to vacuum with a traditional vacuum cleaner.