Roomba Robot Vacuum Gets Siblings

Victor Tramp writes "Apparently, the cute little robot vacuum by iRobot has siblings now! An article over at Forbes.com goes into some detail about the new Roomba models; featuring the Roomba Pro, which 'is an improvement on the original Roomba, including an intelligent navigation system..', and the Roomba Pro Elite, which is the '...new flagship model. It comes with a remote-control unit that lets you navigate the Roomba around the room, changing cleaning options as it goes.' I have one of the original Roombas, and it actually does a really good job!"

Comments

Re:Interesting...

[nonmaskable]

It works great on the medium thickness carpet (as well as the wood and tile) in my home. Cleaning carpet seems to hit the battery harder than cleaning wood, so you can pretty much only get one large and one small room on a charge.

On any surface, it doesn't replace a once every few months hand cleaning with a regular vacuum, but for a once or twice a week cleaning, it really does work.

Re:does it go to the recharger when low on juice?

[ramk13]

Have you seen one? I've used the original. As far as I know they have no 'auto charging' capability. You pick it up when it dies and then plug it into the charger. It's very far from worthless though.

You just clean one or two rooms a day, and you don't have to watch it while it's doing it. It's very convenient, even without the auto recharge feature you are talking about. Features like intellegent autocharging and networking probably won't be in consumer vacuums for a little while. (Especially since a viable Roomba competitor hasn't popped up.)

Re:does it go to the recharger when low on juice?

[MoobY]

I've seen a demonstration of a robot vacuum cleaner a couple of weeks ago (I can't remember the brand, but it was a yellow robot). This vacuum robot did manage to go back to the recharger. But that was not the only thing it could do, it also dumped the collected dust into a container sitting in the recharger, so you never had to actually do anything with the robot, as it was able to feed itself and get rid of the dust. It was however a tad more expensive than the the roomba (but I can't remember the correct price tag either).

A mature product already exists

[CoderByBirth]

The Swedish house appliance manufacturer Electrolux has a model called Trilobite which has been around for a couple of years.

I haven't seen this sucker in action, but if memory serves me correctly it should be able to move around your home on flat surfaces, avoid obstacles and return to the power station.

The Karcher RoboCleaner is much better

[markus_baertschi]

I prefer the Karcher RoboCleaner for one important reason:

It requires almost no manual intervention

You just tell it how often it should go out and clean and once in a while you empty the dirt in the base station. No other interventions are necessary.

Il empties its dirt container itself and recharges itself automatically et the base station.

Details here

Markus

Re:Durability of Roomba?

[Sparr0]

After intentionally disabling the ledge sensors in mine and having it take a tumble down a flight of stairs I can tell you that this is one of the most durable mobile appliances in my house, easily tougher than my normal vacuum cleaner.

Didn't like my Roomba

[Laur]

I bought a Roomba as soon as it came out and ended up returning it within a week. My experiences were thus:

1. It sucked at sucking. It would roll over the same piece of fuzz on the carpet several times and still not pick it up. It just plain didn't work too well. At best it could be a supplement to a regular vacuum, but I didn't think it was worth it.

2. It wasn't much quieter then a regular vacuum. You couldn't really do much while it was working, such as watch TV in the next room. You couldn't ignore it, it was just too loud. This might be okay for people who leave the house often and run it then, but if you're home and just don't like to vacuum this isn't gaining you much.

3. The heuristics didn't work to well. Maybe they worked great in the lab with a perfectly square room, but when it needs to work in the real world and go around furniture it seems to fail miserably. It would go over the same patch of floor 5 or 6 times, yet never go over the patch 5 feet away within the time allowed.

4. It couldn't transition from tile to carpet as advertised. It tried to go over at an angle, got stuck with one wheel on, one off, and proceeded to start rubbing a black rubber mark in my carpet (yes, the carpet/tile transition height was within advertised limits).

I know other people have these and love them, but these are my experiences (YMMV). I found that manually vacuuming and sweeping took much less time and did a much better job. Further, the Roomba can't replace manually sweeping and vacuuming, it can only supplement it, and IMHO the price is too high for that.

I certainly wish iRobot the best of luck with the Roomba, since success with this early model will lead to continuously improved products. I am certainly not against robotic appliances, I also have a Robomower and love it. It has many advantages over a manual mower and no drawbacks (except a bit higher price tag, but the benefits far outweigh this IMHO). It's very quit (I can run it at night), nearly maintenance free (it mulches while it cuts, no bag to empty, no engine to maintain), and completely replaces a standard mower. I long for the day when we have more products like this, but I just didn't think the first gen Roomba was it.