Good ol’ Pat Murphy Stark must have her pretty little hands too full raising her new baby (remember, she was pregnant when she hawked those leg soothers) to do much housework. But, not to fear, because now she has her latest Invention Channel offering, Robo-Maid, to do it for her.
For those who have not seen the ads, R-M is a laughable “poor man’s robotic vaccuum cleaner.” Essentially it looks like a small tin Pilgrim’s hat. An O-shaped Swiffer-type dust pad is stuck to the underside of the brim, and the arrangement is set on the floor. A self-rolling ball (more about this soon) is placed in the crown. The ball does its thing, pushing the R-M around the room while the dust pad sweeps the floor.
My question concerns the ball. It obviously works under the principle of a mouse wheel: a weighted, motorized device is rolling inside the hollow ball which in turn appears to roll under it’s own power. But how “smart” is the R-M ball? The commercials show that there is a timer on the thing, so it won’t roll around forever. Fine. But Pat also implies – with an animated graphic and some dodgey language – that it has some sort of memory that controls its route, insuring that the whole room is swept. I’m pretty sure that real robotic vaccuums costing hundreds of dollars have this technology, but does this twenty-buck, tinny knock-off really have it too? Or does the R-M just go around bumping stupidly into walls and furniture at random in the hope that it covers the whole floor before its timer runs down?
It doesn’t need to have any programming at all. A single weight inside a reversing motorized ball would generally do the job. The R-M might get “stuck” if the ball were in the right position and direction of motion, but that would be uncommon, and there would probably be enough ‘slippage’ for it to eventually shift even then.
Not many people really expect a $20 gadget to operate without an occassional problem. It could be corrected with a nudge of a toe. I can think of many furniture arrangements where the RM could wedge itself (though I think it relies on its low velocity to prevent that) or become otherwise trapped.
The last I checked, the Roomba didn’t have navigational memory or environmental mapping either. Like the RoboMaid, it 'scans the floor via random direction changes within a limited territoryand covers everything “by accident”. That’s why it takes so much time per sq. ft. (relative to its velocity) to completely vacuum a room. Of course, since it’s operating unattended, who cares how long it takes?
Inexpensive navigational mapping (or acceptable installed aids, like the wires embedded at lawn borders for some automated lawn mowers) would allow a very significant new feature: a vacuum cleaner that could constantly maintain an entire floor of a house by itself. It could return by itself to its recharger and resume vacuuming after it was recharged. At present, I don’t believe Roomba can do this. They can only find their charger by accident, which means they can only patrol a limited area on a fixed charge.
I could be very mistaken about the Roomba’s current capacities. I haven’t paid much attention since I saw a demonstration of a prototype.
I would say that Roombas do have a little AI built in. That is they do modify their pattern a little based on multiple encounters with objects. I don’t own one but the reviews I’ve read have stated as such.
As far as ‘Robomaid’ goes, it has absolutely nothing of the kind. It is literally nothing more than one of those cat chase balls (but rechargable). It just can work itself out of corners most of the time thru its offset, eccentric counter-weight design (the same way the cat toys can).
That, with a stupid hat/Swiffer holder on top of it. Pretty goofy overall.