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Roomba Celebrates 10 Years of Cleaning Up After You
SkinnyGuy writes "Roomba, the world’s first multi-million unit-selling home-helper robot, turns 10 today. iRobot has cooked up a self-congratulatory infographic filled with a collection of interesting and occasionally bizarre facts to mark the occasion. Did you know that dogs, cats and babies have ridden iRobot's iconic home cleaning robot since it was introduced exactly a decade ago?"
I want someone to clean up before me.
rewriting history since 2109
Don't forget about the ahimatronic chimp head!
I bought a Roomba years ago to take care of some light-colored carpeting in the living room. I'm not buying another until they come with an under-the-couch dog poop sensor, standard.
Poodle skidmarks, man. Poodle skidmarks.
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I purchased a Roomba a few years ago, and it did little to clean the floors. Spent most of the time getting stuck in a corner, or going around in circles.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
My house (and business) use Neato's, but I'd hardly begrudge the Roomba for making people think "robot vacuum cleaners should be in my house now".
When a regular vacuum can be modified to autonomously clean a room with just a few extra motors and a battery, then it would be worth a 20% markup. Also, a lot of mid to higher end traditional vacuums sell in the same price range as the Roomba - although I can't say where on the scale the Roomba's quality falls.
I've owned a Roomba for ~3 years. After the second set of batteries went out 6 minths ago, I gave up. It cleaned OK (if emptied reguarly) & would park & recharge OK (kept a close eye), but not ready for prime-time.
Mitt Roomba will be our next president.
Mitt Roomba will be our next president.
Yes, because unlike Mitt Romney Mitt Roomba actually has a personality and will talk specifically about what he is capable of getting done.
It didn't immediately decrease the time spent on vacuuming, though — I'd waste the time previously spent pushing a vacuum around just watching it do its thing. Now, at least, I can just let it run, but I do get a feeling of "wow, that's rather cool" each time I run it...
And designed to be user-repaired, or at least parts replaced, which is always a bonus.
Roomba has a place in all of our hearts
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
A decent "regular" vacuum is, for me, a Dyson, and those cost right there. The cheapest used one that doesn't run on batteries could be had for about $200 (in a decent shape, for less if it's in bad shape). A new Dyson from the DC Animal family will run about $400. If Dyson ever made a robotic vacuum, it'd probably cost $1000 or more. I can't imagine a decent robotic one costing much less. Do note that a decent vacuum cleaner must have good beater brushes and a powerful, two stage cyclone-based air filtration system with a HEPA filter on the output (or three stage w/o HEPA). It can all be scaled down in size, but it will be loud as hell, and will run hot.
It's no biggie to have a 1kW turbine and a double (Dyson standard) or even triple cyclone in an enclosure the size of a Roomba, but I don't know where the heck will the batteries fit. The shaft will probably turn at 20k to 30k RPM, otherwise the motor and turbine would be too big. It might need a muffler on the exhaust, seriously, otherwise the whine will make your teeth hurt.
Never mind that you'd probably want 250Wh battery capacity at a minimum (so that it can vacuum for 10 minutes). With derating for battery life in hot operating conditions, 300-350Wh is more like it. That battery would probably cost a good chunk of change all in itself.
It'd be OK to use it when you're not in at home, but you wouldn't want to be around that thing when it's doing the job. Roomba is, performance-wise, a joke. If you want to know how bad it is, if you're cleaning your carpets using one, borrow a Dyson and see how much crap it'll pick up.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Have gnu, will travel.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-roomba-blender-makes-smoothie-out-of-everythin,29539/
http://www.theonion.com/articles/roomba-violates-all-three-laws-of-roombotics,2184/
http://www.theonion.com/articles/roomba-maker-unveils-military-robot,15331/
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I grew up watching those little robots zipping around on the bridge of an Imperial star ship, so when I first powered up the thing I was a giddy. I felt like I was one step closer to the idealized future envisioned in my childhood.
Interesting to read this considering we got a Roomba about two months ago. iRobot clearly put a lot of thought into it's design, at least from a mechanical standpoint. It's fun to watch for the first 15 minutes. However, that amusement then turns to intense frustration as the damn thing keeps returning to the same area. Even worse is when it's in return-to-dock mode, gets within 5 feet of the dock and decides to go off in some random direction.
Prior to buying the Roomba I wasn't aware of how much competition actually exists. There are some robot vacuums which exhibit quite a bit more intelligence than anything from iRobot. They scan the room, then vacuum back and forth in neat lines, turning only where there's an obstacle. Those are impressive to watch and you feel like you're actually observing sort of machine intelligence. The Roomba doesn't feel any smarter than some battery powered toy with a bumper to detects walls. That said from what I've read those smarter vacuums aren't necessarily more effective. And they manage to get stuck just the some. And interestingly, some of the high end units out there uses the same random way-finding method as the Roomba.
I'd say a Roomba is better suited for a single-room space, like a loft, with little clutter. Otherwise you have to prepare your environment for your Roomba. And if you have multiple rooms you have to cordon off each space so that it's more likely to do a proper job. You end up devoting more effort than you should need to manage the thing. It does an adequate job, but it inconsistent from day to day. One thing I don't understand is why they haven't built in a power conservation mode, so that when it's trying to return to dock the vacuum will shut down and all it's powering is wheels and sensors.
Outside of the addition of some sensors and adjustments to the vacuum system, the design hasn't changed much at all. It still bounces off everything like it always has. There's so much potential there. It feels like the company has decided to focus their efforts on more experimental technology and use Roomba as a cash cow. In 10 years I would have expected smarter robots.
If you want to know how bad it is, if you're cleaning your carpets using one, borrow a Dyson and see how much crap it'll pick up.
Yea, the see how much more it picks up demonstration is the reason we have a Kirby.
http://www.greatvacs.com/education/KirbyVsDysonVacuumReview.html
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Not sure where you're shopping, but you either only looked at the top of the line model or they're ripping you off.
Try more like $200.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
A decent "regular" vacuum is, for me, a Dyson, and those cost right there.
I'll give you a hint. If they have to advertise it on an infomercial, it's crap. Sure it costs as much as a Kirby, but it is nowhere near as good as a Kirby. But you are correct that in comparison to the Roomba, just about any regular vacuum cleaner is going to come out looking like a miracle worker.
Maybe i am getting senile, but isn't this the second Roomba slashvertisement in the last week?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
"I say, we must move forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!"
They both suck, though.
Perhaps there really is some difference in the quality of vacuum cleaning from a Kirby but I suspect most people will comfort themselves with buying which costs 1/5th the price which is almost as good and weighs half as much. And buying it without some a salesman refusing to leave their house wearing them down for hours until they buy the thing.
Yeah, we have a Kirby, two roombas, and two Dysons (don't even ask why).
The Kirby is the all time champion for raw cleaning power, and the roombas are the worst in the same category. Dyson's in the middle somewhere, closer to the Kirby end of the spectrum.
But! The kirby and dysons won't vacuum the room for you while you are washing the dishes and cleaning the cat box. And the Kirby cannot be used except by large physically fit people (we've got two family members who can't lift it, and we originally got it because Nana could not even push it ten feet on carpet). So they are all great for 3 different use cases.
The Roomba isn't meant to replace a real vacuum like a Dyson. It can't compare. What a Roomba DOES do is make it so you don't have to vacuum as much. By getting enough of the dirt, you don't vacuum as often. So the way I've always viewed my Roomba is as a device that allows me to vacuum less frequently and for the carpet to be cleaner in between those times.
But! The kirby and dysons won't vacuum the room for you while you are washing the dishes and cleaning the cat box.
This is why I got a Neato (the one with the Laser scanner). I have it programmed to vacuum 4 times a week and my carpets have never been cleaner (mainly because I hate vacuuming.) All I have to do is rescue it the few times it's gotten lost in my house (and the one time it got caught on some sheets I forgot to pick up) and clean it's dust bin.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Several years ago, we demoed a Dyson unit. They look cool and have good marketing, but we were pretty disappointed by its actual performance. It cost more and performed worse than the Hoover vacuum we wound up getting instead. Right now we have a Sebo, and it works great.
As for the Roomba's performance, isn't there an argument that you can have it go out and vacuum every day? If you have it set to do that, then your carpets shouldn't get dirty enough that the lower performance is an issue. It also means that your carpets stay clean the whole week, rather than having one day where they look real nice and six days getting progressively worse (or am I the only one who vacuums only once a week?).
(Dear lord, I can't believe I'm talking about vacuuming right now.)
If you can't convince them, convict them.
My only comment, Spent the money on the Roomba and the Scooba within 18 months both were completely dead.
The Roomba lost its mind and no amount of fiddling could get it back.
The Scooba was replaced 3 times due to a design flaw that iRobot refused to admit to, but is well documented on the web.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
I have a small Kirby that I use for cleaning out vehicles it is awesome. It was my mom's vacuum and use to have a bunch of attachments but most of them broke or were lost a long time ago so I asked if I could have it when she bought a new different vacuum. Seriously that little vacuum sucks like a black hole with daddy issues.
Time to offend someone
I'll be interested when they invent one that a) can do stairs, and b) can empty its own bin into a trash receptacle when full.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
http://djroomba.com/
Rockin' the house and keepin' it clean!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Had to do it... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXhsUPtsiLU
You are all a bunch of idots.
Roomba is, performance-wise, a joke. If you want to know how bad it is, if you're cleaning your carpets using one, borrow a Dyson and see how much crap it'll pick up.
I guess it depends on the model. It's certainly not the case for the one I bought for my wife. She has a Dyson too. In all honesty I think the compliment each other more so than compete. The Roomba runs on our first floor every night at 3 am. My wife usually gets out the Dyson and carpet shampooer once every month or two. Regardless, the Roomba still finds plenty to clean up afterward. I think part of it is that it can get into places easier than a big ass Dyson, plus it has a little spinning brush that can get under baseboard and other things better. The Roomba also doesn't need as much suction as a Dyson as the impeller blades are much closer to the floor than they are on the Dyson. If I had to make a choice between the two, Roomba would win without a second thought.
As far as maintenance, I'm truly impressed with how the Roomba is designed. It's pretty modular and very easy to take apart. Most of the modules are also held together with actual screws instead of glue or rivets. So it's actually possible to fix a lot of things yourself if you feel like it, rather than buy a new module. The version I bought for my wife six years ago was one a step down from their commercial one. When they came out with a newly designed vacuum bin, they made it fit older models. So we were able to upgrade it for $35 +/- instead of buying a new one.
By the time the salesman left it wasn't us that was worn out, it was him. He must have been there 5 hours and we paid a fraction of the original price.
The Kirby is a really good product, but I do agree the way they are sold is not very good.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
The Halloween Episode (season 4 episode 6) a roomba was active in a crime scene (and got stomped by Gibbs) and "collected" the brass.
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I forgot about it after it was brought up here just five days ago.
I wonder if you ever heard of Dennis Ritchie.
I'm sure even if I did want a powerful vacuum cleaner that there are other makes which can be purchased from a normal store which offer similar performance for a fixed and lower price. As it stands even my 60 euro bagless phillips is perfectly adequate for my needs and has lasted 3 years. I could stick 2000 euros in the bank (an amount which some people paid for their Kirby) and the interest alone would pay for replacement cleaners if and when they gave up the ghost.
I wanted to get one, but they are loud like vacuum cleaners. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Dyson? Regular? Really?
I got a Dyson upright and it died after a year - it constantly got blocked needing disassembling and cleaning once a week. It eventually died by blowing dust out of its exhaust and I gave up with it after 3 hours of trying to find the problem. It couldn't cope with anything more than light dust. That was a heavy maintenance vacuum cleaner. I also hated not having a bag as emptying the cylinder in my wheelie bin would generate a lot of dust. I eventually emptied the cylinder directly into a bag before binning it.
I then got an Henry as cleaners in nearly every commercial premises I've seen use one and I thought "Pretty much all companies use the Henry vac and their cleaning demands are much greater than domestic demands so they should be hardy" so I got one. Cost me £80 ($130) for a HEPA version including 30 free bags. I've abused it heavily, including accidentally knocking it down a flight of stairs, and regularly vacuuming up building rubble. It's now 7 years old and still works fantastic. The design has barely changed in 32 years for a good reason! It got blocked only once which took me 5 minutes to clear. It's missing a couple features I'd like to have, but I'm not complaining.
Kirby has serious issues:
1. Yeah, the pipe is big, but a bigger pipe means slower airflow. Sure it has lower losses in that pipe and the pipe won't clog as easily with large stuff. What it will clog with is fine particulates that will build up over time because air flows too slow. There's a tradeoff between self-cleaning ability of a pipe and its diameter and thus propensity to clog in presence of large particles ("junk"). If you have big junk on the floor, you're supposed to use a shop vac. That one is designed to deal with big junk. If you're OK with carrying around a shop vac, don't buy a Dyson *or* Kirby, duh, but decide what the heck is it that you want. A shop vac is putting that big pipe to a good use. A Kirby, well, just wastes space with that big pipe.
2. The filter. The filter is a joke. Bag anything in a vacuum is a joke in 21st century. You're not supposed to, you know, get dirty while emptying it. In a Dyson you can go up to a couple dozen cleanings between having to clean the canister.
3. The air whatever test: I don't know what the tool purports to test, but sure as heck it doesn't test suction power. Power measured in, you know, units of power, like Watts. Suction power is quite important, because it gives an idea of how much work the air could do (at most) to extract dirt. Generally speaking, the mechanical suction power will always be less than the electrical power consumed from the outlet. So if you have a 7 amp Kirby and a 12 amp Dyson, the Kirby won't ever have the same potential of developing suction power as a Dyson has, unless the Dyson is much less efficient at converting electrical to mechanical power of the air flow (suction). Power in the airflow is given as pressure * flow rate. A tool better be calibrated in Watts if it purports to measure airflow (suction) power.
4. You can't compare apples to oranges. Dirt extraction isn't all about airflow, nor even all about air power. It's a combination of the beater brush performance *and* air power (suction power). All I know is that I had various contemporary vacuums in the 200-500 USD range, all made between 2000 and 2010, and compared to Dyson animal (large canister) they were rather subpar performers.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I think you've run into their production run that had a well known issue. I'm not apologizing for them, just stating facts. It's not normal performance, and you're not the only one who had that issue. I find it incredulous that most customers wouldn't even bother trying to figure out what's wrong -- it was a simple problem with the inner-to-outer cyclone seal (the ring in the middle of the bottom of the canister that seals the upper cyclone dirt collector cylinder to the bottom cover of the canister, IIRC).
I guess people won't spend a couple minutes trying to imagine how the damn thing works -- namely that the outer cyclone spins out the big dirt, and the fine dirt gets spun out by the inner cyclones, with the final cleaning done by the foam prefilter and HEPA postfilter. If big dirt gets to the inner cyclones, they obviously don't have capacity to spin that out (they're tiny!), so the prefilter gets clogged up in short order.
The prefilter, in my case, collects occasional hairs and a fine sprinkling of dust that we clean twice a year if we won't forget. The HEPA has been swapped once, probably for no good reason since it's rated for the life of the vacuum. The exhaust side sure looked clean, even if the intake was black -- I think quite a few of that black was graphite from the brushes.
I give Dyson demerits for awful handling of the customers who had this issue -- they pretended the problem didn't exist. If I run into that issue and had to deal with their crap, I'm sure I'd have sour aftertaste, but then I'd have probably figured it out and fixed it myself before getting in touch with anyone. I do usually break warranties. I think every new thing I buy gets torn to pieces soon after it's taken out of the box. How else will one stay current in engineering? ;)
When it comes to Dysons, I think that the ball models are a bit underengineered due to smaller plumbing and smaller motor. The best performance is to be had from full-size uprights -- if you see them in a store, simply select the one that has largest piping and largest canister volume. That's all there's to it.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
No.
1. Really good regular vacuum cleaner costs ~300 EUR. Things like Dyson costs even more.
2. If you toss in extra motors and a battery in it, making it 500 EUR, it still does not autonomously cleans your house.
3. Roomba starts from 270 EUR: http://www.irobot.com/de/store/store_products.aspx?id=487
I own one and I love it (and I do have vacuum cleaner too, BTW).
For me the best vacuum for your money is a blue one. I have a blue vacuum cleaner, and it picks up the cat hair from the carpet and the dust bunnies and little bits of kitty litter too. It uses an advanced paper-bag filtering system, which both collects dirt and hair while filtering the air it returns to the room. It also has a sophisticated height-adjusting system that allows me to use it both on carpet and on smooth surfaces, such as hardwood floors. Additionally, it has a binary power control system allowing me to adjust its state of function independent of my proximity to the wall outlet. It is truly a superior device.