Straight out of a Richie Rich comic book comes Irona, the robot maid! This time she’s here to help you do the floors. Yes, you can pick up a robot floor vacuum cleaner for yourself and free yourself for other more meaningful, creative activities.
All you have to do is to turn the robot on. After that it deals with all the vacuuming duties by itself, no supervision required! It runs according to a program which is embedded in its circuitry. The robot can be easily reprogrammed by the user from time to time. This reprogramming can be done directly or remotely. Some robots use the Internet, others use the equally ubiquitous cell phone system to perform remote programming.
Sophisticated logic circuits scan the floor to determine the amount of dirt there, and compute the number of passes required to clean the area. The robot then moves ahead and repeats the scan. In this way the whole area designated for cleaning is covered. No more getting down on your hands and knees to clean under the bed or the couch - the robot is designed to clean all those hard to reach places.
The special feature of the robot floor vacuum cleaner is that it does its work unsupervised. Why is that special? You don’t have to be on hand to guide it around the room, avoiding the furniture. The robot is armed with high tech sensors which tell it when to stop at a wall or to work its way around a chair which wasn’t there yesterday. A low-end model has mechanical sensors which signal the robot to stop only after they contact the obstacle. Such a robot should be equipped with rubber bumpers to prevent damage to delicate objects which may come in the way of the robot when it is doing its work.
The robot vacuum cleaner does its job real well. There is a small problem with cleaning tight areas like the join of the floor and the wall, and corners. This robot does a great job with general house cleaning. The fine cleaning will have to be done manually.
Your robot can’t climb stairs and so you’ll have to do the stairs too. Then you’ll have to look out for other problems that the robot can’t handle. One example is the loose fringe that is often found on the edge of rugs and carpets. The long loose threads of the fringes can get ingested by the robot vacuum cleaner, causing it to come to a grinding halt. These and some other problems still need to be sorted out. But they are incidental to the main work that the robot does so well, and that is floor cleaning.
The robot works on any flooring surface that is common in households and offices. It is good at picking up the usual mess around the house, bits of paper and plastic, matchsticks, hair shed by your pets, and even a little water or other liquid spilt here and there.
The robot vacuum cleaner can move freely around the room because it does not need to be tethered to a power receptacle. It carries its own rechargeable battery. Some models return to a base station and get recharged all by themselves. The price of the robot depends on the features that are provided in that particular model. The low-end models are quite affordable. The price of the high-end models is quite steep, obviously.
The biggest advantage of the robot floor cleaner is that it frees you from diverting your time and attention to this daily chore. If you look at it this way, the robot floor cleaner saves you your time. But it does take quite a while longer to do its job compared to the time it takes to do the job under human supervision. The best thing is to turn it on when you leave for work. The floors will be spick and span when you return.
Ah yes, there’s also the small matter of emptying the robot floor cleaner which is still your responsibility. But this is just a minor irritant compared to the advantages of having a robot do your vacuuming for you. Not only does it save you your time, it releases you from that feeling of drudgery that is part and parcel of doing the same old job, day in and day out.