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My Roomba has become the 3rd pet in our household after Max the dog and Sneakers the cat.  When he gets stuck on a stack of papers or pinned under furniture, the housemates know how to extract him, tap his clean button twice and have our robovacuum continue on his merry way.  The other pets have also welcomed it into their hearts by having coping strategies beyond merely scattering should it come within 10 feet of them as they did when the Roomba was first acquired.  The cat now blithely jumps to a higher surface and lets the Roomba go about its business.  Max knows that the edges of his bed are sufficiently that the Roomba is stopped by the plush barrier and retreats to it when he hears the Roomba’s whirring.

Today, Max was a bit more splayed out than usual and the Roomba kept hitting his extended paws.  Max would dutifully nudge over an inch, the Roomba would hit him again, and Max would rotate a bit more.  The Roomba got Max to do two full revolutions before Max found a pose where he was entirely within the confines of his dog bed.  The Roomba now had another role, dance partner.

 

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My Roomba started doing what I will the “I DON’T GET IT!” dance whereby once turned on, it would rapidly nudge forward and backward while spinning and then shut itself down.  I assumed there was something wrapped around the wheels so I took apart the casings and found nothing.  Then, I de-haired every area I could get access to with still no success.  Finally, I googled the Roomba dance and found that it’s quite common and comes from the cliff detection beams, the system the Roomba uses to prevent itself from running off things, being dirty.  Dog hair was preventing the IR beam from being either sent or received and the Roomba was interpreting this as being surrounded by cliffs as if being stuck at the top of a phone pole.  I cleaned out these recesses and the Roomba emitted its tiny victory chime.  Looking around, the space around my chair was a disaster of dog hair, cat hair, dust, and carpet pieces that I had no interest in vacuuming so, I set the Roomba the task of cleaning up after itself which it did so cheerfully.  I wonder if this is the robotic equivalent of having to clean up the OR after one has surgery.

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A coworker was taking apart his Roomba today at work and marveling at its complexity as he removed great tufts of dog hair from it.  “It’s not amazing, but it’s mediocre daily, which is better than me vacuuming well once a week” he said to another fellow skeptical of its effectiveness.  “Show me how it works” asked the second guy, so the Roomba was placed on the floor and started.

Coworker 2: I see that it navigates around, but how well does it pick up things?
Coworker 1: Let’s see.  *scatters hole punch detritus on the floor, starts Roomba*
Coworker 2: It doesn’t really pick it up.
Coworker 1: It works on the assumption that it’ll go over the same area multiple times, it’ll get it eventually.

So we waited a bit and none of the pieces appeared to be picked up.  A pen was made around the paper leavings with boxes and the Roomba was placed inside so it could go no where else and still the paper bits stayed.  Eventually, the demonstrator said “I guess paper is hard to pick up” and it was left at that.

Later, a member of housekeeping came by with a dustpan and brush and cleaned up the bits as part of his rounds.  Quieter, faster, and without much fanfare, a von Neumann machine did what was necessary to provide for itself.

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There are some little tasks I do around the house that I consider important sorting mail and filtering out things that shouldn’t go into the fridge.  I was worried about these being completed during my time away but returned to see that they’d been done with mixed results:

1) The mail was sorted into two piles: My dad’s mail and everyone else’s

2)The Roomba was on charge and had appeared to run a few times based on the tracks in the carpet but the carpet was dirty.  The operator doesn’t seem to have ever emptied the device.

3) The fridge was very clean.  Partly because whomever cleaned it out threw out the baby with the bathwater in chucking not only the leftovers but the containers they were in.  Also, I’m pretty sure before I left there was 2 lbs of sealed Irish bacon that was nowhere near expiring.  Either something went very wrong with it or something went very right.

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My Roomba appears to get beached on carpets thicker than 1/2 inch so I now move those before running it.  Also, it clears 3 out of 4 fixtures in the living room but not one chair.  After these disappointments I’ve tried to use it as a table cleaner and a way to do corridors.  My final disappointment: I thought the Roomba would do a better job as a pool table cleaner.  I sense a market opportunity.

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My father and brother succumb to what I call the “Roomba Paradox” which is that any time saved by using the device is lost to simply staring at the thing operate.  My father has faithfully followed mine around to three rooms on our ground floor to watch the pattern and my brother will physically relocate dirt in front of his rather than just letting it roam about.  I appear to be immune to this phenomenon and in polling other Roomba owners the brake seems to occur sharply with those born in 1983.  Maybe additional data will narrow it to a particular month.

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Long ago, someone suggested to me that nature would one day rise up and crush man.  He wasn’t talking about this in the sense that we’d be undone by our own destruction of the environmental balance but in a literal sense that apes, dogs, and groundhogs would begin attacking people.   Quaint but unlikely and I propose the simple counter than I’ve never met an animal that could suffer a vacuum cleaner for more than 10 seconds.  I purchased a Roomba as the second robot of my birthday and training max to endure the Roomba without much barking has been, tough.   These were my steps:

  1. See if Max would associate his love of freshly vacuumed surfaces (no success)
  2. Place treats on the Roomba while off  (success!)
  3. Place treats on the Roomba while it was beeping (success!)
  4. Place treats on the Roomba while it was doing lines back and forth controlled by a remote (success!)
  5. Place treats on the Roomba while it was running normally (barking like we were in the end times)

If I had to guess, I think Max finds the turn mechanism of the Roomba menacing or maybe he thinks the Roomba is having a seizure when it wails into the same section of the wall over and over.  Either way, if there is an animal uprising, I’m confident the pseudorandomly directed casters of the blue gremlin will save me.