Ready for Roomba and RoboMower?

Continuing their home-automation tour, the Duo turn their attention to a home robot you've probably heard about: Roomba, the vacuuming robot. The Roomba Discovery SE is one of many versions of IRobot's carpet-cleaning machines. And as the Duo taped this they were awaiting the Scooba, which will use soap and water to clean floors. (Angela, eagerly awaiting; Steve, less so.)

Angela, who admits that she found herself staring at the little vacuum for literally an hour at a time, notes that when you watch the Roomba in action you get a sense of just how complex a task it is to teach a machine to do what we do. She found that it really did clean the entire floor in her apartment ... but not in the pattern she or any other human would. The Roomba's technology, in fact, was developed to sweep for buried mines. It uses barrier-sensing and an algorithmic process, whereas humans would just use our eyes to figure out what to roll over.

The Roomba has basic, intensive, and spot modes, and when you choose and press the button (either on the device or its remote), it backs out of its dock with a charming series of beeps and starts doing its thing, which involves not only vacuuming, but learning the room--a process that includes lots of bumping into walls and other obstacles, which can include infrared barriers that steer Roomba away from such DMZs as the stairs or the cat's dish.

Steve was annoyed that the instructions tell you to get cords out of the way; Roomba didn't do damage to his, but he didn't like watching the robot chew them up and spit them out. (Notes informing Steve that ordinary vacuums include the very same instructions may be directed to the usual address.) And at one point he noted that the Roomba got stuck under a chair and couldn't get out, while Angela's still wondering why the gadget once found a 3-foot-square area in front of a closet door to need 20 minutes' worth of attention.

Outside, the Friendly Robotics RoboMower does the Roomba thing for your lawn, only with sharp whirling blades (and with barrier wires rather than infrared beams). Steve and Angela left testing on this gadget to their producer and his lawn; according to him, the RoboMower performed well on a pretty steep grade, and it switched itself off when a neighborhood dog grabbed hold of the front bumper with its teeth. But this isn't the kind of product you want to just set and forget.