IRobot

Well not I Robot the movie but this little guy the IRobot the vacuum cleaner.

It's been a while since I post anything up on the little blog so I guess I'll start with this little contraption which is the IRobot Vacuum cleaner. We got it recently and have been using it for about a week or so and so far it's really great. We can now just go out for lunch let the guy run around the rooms and hey presto the rooms are clean when we get back and the little guys will be just sitting there in it's little docking bay recharging itself.

I think it's a great little invention. IT has this 'Base Station' or 'Docking Bay' as I call it where you plug it into the walk socket turn it on and it acts as a charger and to tell the robot cleaner to return to it once it is running out of battery or has done the cleaning job. You just press the start button and off the little sucker goes, it will back out of it's docking bay and zoom off cleaning in a what the company calls an intelligent sensor system to clean the rooms. I can say it works well the amount of dust collected was amazing since the little guy has the ability to go under and into little corners which normally we would not vacuum up. It's got this little 3 brush like extension which helps it get into corners. It's low enough to go under beds, chairs and tables. It even is able to tell when it is coming to a wall or obstacle and it slows down and gently bump into it where this shock absorber like faceplate will be depressed and it turns and goes off into another direction. It is even able to sense drop offs and will not fall off a table which is good when it senses the drop off near the bathrooms. It's easy to clear the dust just pull out the back compartment and dump the dust out. It comes with what they call a 'virtual wall' which is a device which produces a IR beam that makes the robot think there is a wall there and turns away. It is also able to do 'SPOT' cleaner where you tell it to clean just a particular area. So far some of the drawbacks I see are that it does not sense small or thin items like chair legs and some light weight material so generally we just move those aside before we start it up.

 

I do really like it, I would recommend to get one and if you really want to be more advance they have the scheduler model which allows you to set when the IRobot starts clean so you can set it to start in the afternoon just before you get home from work. Further more it has saved me from all the vacuuming housework which I had to do previously ha ha  ... :)