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Segway vs. Roomba
Jerry23 writes "We all knew it would happen. We just didn't know when. But Second Life's Cory Ondrejka has just blogged The Encounter: At last weekend's Accelerating Change Conference, Dean Kamen's demon seed, the Segway personal transporter, met Helen Greiner's lovechild, the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, in a climactic crash that will echo through the ages.
And I quote: "That night also had what was, for me, the highlight of the conference. I refer, of course, to the ultimate convergence of technology. The perfect connection of human and robot. The consumate collision of 21st century geek products. I am referring, of course, to the moment that a Segway ran over Roomba."
"
"Yes, some people had problems, but for the most part this fairly unnatural motion on an inverted pendulum went smoothly."
Yeah, problems. Like the demonstrator I saw take a violent Segway header at the Minnesota State Fair last year. While he's giving his pitch, one of the wheels on his Segway hit a tiny patch of water on the slick floor. The wheel spun and smoked like a funny car doing a burn-out, and the guy went down so hard that his head bounced about six inches off of the floor. Next day he was back, with a cast on one arm, and a hockey helmet on his head.
Yeah, the inverted pendulum is a cute trick, but then again, so is riding a unicycle. I wouldn't advise my grandmother to ride either one. On the other hand, I would give her a Roomba. I own one, and apart from driving my pet beagle completely ballistic, it's great.
About the word "if": If bullfrogs had wings, they wouldn't bounce around on their little green butts.
why not combine them into a rideable vaccum for large offices ; )
Well, the author mentioned that the majority of people had the Segway mastered in about 15 seconds (which I have to admit is pretty amazing, if true).
The Roomba, OTOH, I cannot imagine is all that difficult to understand. Put it on the floor and turn it on. From what I have seen of the one at my parents' house it kinda just does its thing from there.
What I want to compare is the maintenance needs for both. That includes recharging requirements and in the case of the Roomba how many times you need to empty it's (from what I remember) very small dirt collector.
If the Segway takes 15 seconds to learn and goes for hours without a charge or required stop to perform some necessary task I would say the Segway wins.
Perhaps the Roomba has a larger collection bin than the one my parents have but I doubt it. Personally, using a regular vaccum seems like a lot less hassle to me.
"Spent the weekend at a fascinating conference - Accelerating Change 2004 ...
... A Roomba was busy cleaning one of the meeting rooms, so it was interesting to actually observe one up close...
... there were two Segways available to the conference participants ...
There were some spectacular collisions, but none topped the moment that a fast moving Segway, slightly out of control, met Roomba, zipping across the floor like a suicidal squirrel. Amazingly, neither seemed the worse for the wear. The Segway popped up and over while Roomba emitted a few beeps from button presses but both continued on their way. Impressive engineering on several levels, actually. Roomba, for surviving the impact
unharmed and Segway for not tipping over."
Saves you from reading the articleI'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
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I have one and it's actually incredibly effective on hard surfaces. It doesn't really rely on suction power, more on a rotating brush, although it does maximize its suction power by confining it to a squeegee-ish vacuum strip.
The thing that makes the Roomba totally kick-ass is this little spinning brush it has sticking out of the side. This brush, which is mounted to a flexible rubber piece, does edges and corners far better than any traditional vacuum. Because of this, the roomba can vacuum a room with wood or tile floors far more thoroughly than a person with a regular vacuum.
I was standing about three feet away when the segway ran over the roomba. It was indeed a great testimony to the hardiness of both machines. You could probably make a great game out of it; release a couple of speedy roombas and see how many you can run over in a given time limit.
What I actually found more interesting though, was the number of times people fell off the segways. I've been to a few conferences before where people were taking turns on a segway, and I'd never seen anyone fall off. In about 30 minutes of watching the segway riders at ACC 2004 people fell off at least two dozen times and ran into immobile objects just as much. Also people kept overcompensating when trying to get on it for the first time and were thrown into this violent thrashing mode where they'd feel like they were falling forward so they'd rapidly lean back, causing the segway to pull back and then they'd feel like they were falling back so they'd rapidly lean forward, etc. One guy got into this mode after zipping around waaay too fast and was slammed face first into the carpet -really hard-. Looked like a snowboarder digging an edge in.
My theory on this was that at all the other conferences there was only one segway, but at this one there were two. Somehow the presence of another segway rider was causing people to push themselves too far too fast instead of easing into it.
They are fun to ride though, even if you do look like a dork doing it.
The newer roombas (Discover, et.al.) do a pretty good job of doing multiple rooms, and have a somewhat larger dust bin over the original units.. I'm not sure how much dust/dirt you expect to get out of each room, but if you run it at least weekly it should be able to handle the load.
We run ours every night after dinner (we have two children under age 5, so we need to sweep up the debris every night to keep any critters at bay), and the thing does our entire 1st floor (about 4 12x15 foot rooms, all hardwoods -- carpets take more time/power) in about an hour. The older batteries used to last about 6-8 months before loosing about half their capacity, but iRobot is supposed to have a "new" battery that will last twice as long.
The maintenace was an issue on the earlier models, though. The brass bushings/bearings on the counter-rotating brushes would get fouled with hair/dust, and eventually start heating up. If they weren't cleared at least weekly, they would heat up so much that the plastic bracket holding the bushings would melt, and the brushes would eventually not engage the unit's drive socket.
The newer roombas have a much better design, and can be cleaned more easily (i.e. without a needing a screwdriver), and they seek the recharging base when they are low on power.