Welcome to the future

My house always has dog hair all over the place, and it doesn't help that I rarely vacuum.  Thankfully my roommate does occasionally, but it's too infrequent to make a huge difference in air quality.  Enter the Roomba.

After hearing liv_e_uh rave about her new robot vacuum, I decided to give it a try.  They make a few models and they're all essentially the same, except for a few extra accessories on the pricier models.  The Bed Bath and Beyond ad that came in the mail that day contained a 20% off coupon which made the choice that much easier.  I opted for the Discovery model because I wanted the home base charging unit.  This model also comes with 2 virtual walls (the Roomba won't cross the infrared beam created by the virtual wall), a remote, and a wall hanger.

The inaugural run of the Roomba was made in my main room downstairs because it tends to see the most dog hair.  After removing all the extraneous ground clutter (dog toys) I fired it up and let it go to work.  My dog mostly ignored it but Christine's was freaked out and jumped up on the couch for some serious consoling:

It's pretty funny to see a 100 pound dog get upset with a 10 pound robot.  It took a LONG time for it to clean that room.  So long that I decided to shut it off after over an hour so I could go to bed.  I was a little worried that my new child was mentally handicapped, but I've since cleaned other rooms and it worked fine.  I think it got confused after running into the dogs at various places in the room, but I'm not sure.  More experimentation is necessary.

The verdict?  So far, so good.  My roommate tells me that I've vacuumed more in the past week than I have the entire time she's lived there.  The algorithm it uses while cleaning could stand to be improved.  If the iRobot people were smart they'd sponsor a computer engineer's senior project because I've seen way more sophisticated navigation from college projects.  But since I'm not walking around vacuuming, I'm not too concerned that the program is wasteful.  It seems to do a pretty decent job of picking up pet hair.  I actually paused it to empty the dust bin in some rooms because there was so much hair.  One of the cooler things the Roomba does is vacuum under the bed:

Following a close second in coolness is the way it parks itself on the charger when it's done or the battery is running low.  The remote control is mostly useless.  I mean, how lazy am I if I can't even be bothered to get off my butt to turn on the automatic vacuum cleaner?  The one redeeming factor about the remote is that I can actually drive the Roomba with it and chase the dogs (or the neighborhood kids).

Apparently people name their Roomba.  I haven't picked a name yet, but for the time being I'll use "Charro".