A Roomba With a View

A few weeks back, I was talking with some coworkers over lunch about the Roomba. For some reason, I was half-contemplating getting one… and Eddie mentioned wanting to purchase a Scooba.

Lo and behold, it turned out that Katie actually owned a Roomba (she won it at a Q101 holiday party, a year or so ago). She wasn’t all that fond of the thing, and offered to let me have it!

I agreed to “borrow” it on a temporary basis, just to check the guy out and see if I liked it. This pic and video is from our cleaning day yesterday, and my first trial cleaning run.

All in all, I rather liked the little robot. It’s much louder than you think it’d be, but I guess that makes sense since it’s technically a vacuum cleaner. It’s also much larger than you’d imagine, as I thought it’d be about the size of, say, a saucer or a thing of Cool Whip. In actuality, it’s closer to the size of a large dinner plate, or even a steering wheel.

In my opinion, it did a pretty good job of cleaning up the dining room area. As I understand it, it operates in a spiral pattern, moving out in wider and wider circles from where it first starts off. Additionally, it takes about 30+ minutes for any given room, and averages about 3 passes over any given area.

It does get a bit bumpy around things, as it uses (soft) collision to detect limits and objects around it. But it systematically remembers where things are, and maps out the room at each turn. A few times, I wondered if it would get lodged between the chair legs, but it always found a way out eventually.

The one danger I’d say with getting one of these guys is if you’re like me, you’ll end up just standing there, watching it move around objects. But then again, if you’re like me, you also used to enjoy watching Disk Defragmenter do its thing in Windows 95.