Robots for sale in Home Depot ... the future is here !!!

And like everybody else with a Roomba, you'll use it about twice before realizing it's a lousy vacuum and a dumb toy.

John Nagle

What types of floors have you used it on ?

I used my Roomba twice. In the first two days that is.

I have used my Roomba evey other day for the last 18 months to sweep my kitchen, back hall, bathroom and front hall.

The Roomba is really a floor sweeper, not a vacuum cleaner, and it does a very nice job of getting the cat and dog hair swept up every other day.

That's good to know, Alan. I have a cat and hardwood floors --- sounds like a good match to me.

I second Alan's recommendation. We have three indoor cats. If not for Roomba, every two weeks or so I could pick up enough hair to make another cat.

The best part is that it also picks up the cat litter they track around the house.

Jeff.

jc-Atl wrote:

This brought an idea I had a few years ago back to mind....

BIO robots, powered by organic matter. You have this cage on wheels that searches for cats. there is bait in the cage. some cat food. the cats go for the food, the cage closes, and the robot digests the cat. Now he has more energy to go hunt for another cat.

You could throw your Roomba away and feed your hungry robot.

Jeff Shirley wrote:

If it doesn't run Linux, I'm not interested.

;-)

They've had these in Target for the past year or so. They also have a $99 Black-Decker robotic "vac" [ie, sweeper], which the reviews didn't paint too favorably. Article in the paper said iRobot has now sold

1,000,000 of the roombavacs. Someone locally has one, and said it's more interesting to watch than most of the stuff that's on TV :).

Regards unix-compatibility [re Alan.K], isn't there a port on the roombavac, and some ability to interface it?

You're quite right. What we really need is a robot that wanders around eating Linux machines ;)

How about a silicon powered robot; it runs around and eats Windows

Rich

Sounds fine...just as long as it leaves my doors alone ;)

How's it do with throw rugs with fringe on a hardwood floor?

I think roomba would get stuck in rug fringe.

Uh, okay.

========================== Anyone know the algorithm it uses? Is it a random walk like a creepy crawly pool sweeper, or does it try to navigate a raster or square spiral or ???

First we had germanium. The problem with germanium is that it melts at fairly low temperatures. Then came silicon. The problem with silicon is that it produces a lot of heat.

That is why we can't make a solid state hard drive, or a chunk of memory the size of a brick. Silicon also necessitates the use of moving parts, such as fan motors. The fewer constantly moving parts the better, and longer lasting the machine will be.

We need to find a replacement for silicon, which will produce less heat, or no heat at all.

I agree that non-proprietary software should be used, because using Windows, or Legos, or some other proprietary software is something like being an engineer at a company, in which the company owns all of the engineers ideas for 7 years after his departure.

I would use experimental software (probably Linux) for experimental machines (Robots and Androids). This is because the source code is freely available, and can be adjusted to run on your machine, and no other, or to be universal, as the user pleases.

Michael