When a robot vacuums your house

The writer tests a clean-up robot and finds that it is more suited for a wireless home

One of my first impressions in childhood was that of the two robots from Star Wars — C-3PO and R2-D2. As I grew older, I found that these two were fiction. In reality, the nearest we could come to wasn’t even Wall-E. It could at the most be something like the Aibo, which was — let’s face it — just a toy.

But hey, I had been only looking for robots, which looked like living creatures. Turns out, robots are taking over the world! Okay, that was a joke. What I meant was robots are common on assembly lines, hotels and also in some homes. They might not look like C-3PO or R2-D2, but what about the bot that cleans the pool? The one that cleans the windows? And, of course, the one that cleans your room?

Yes, we’re talking about vacuum bots — the most common category of robots currently. About four years ago, an Indian firm called Milagrow introduced me to this category with its Redawk. But today, I am about to test the Roomba 870, a top-of-the-line offering from iRobot, a Bedford, Massachusetts-based advanced technology company.

The Roomba 870 looks big (bigger than the Milagrow Redawk), but is surprisingly light. It comes with a charging station and two virtual “walls” — basically pointers that tell the robot that it’s no-go beyond a particular point, such as the bathroom.

I charge it up and set the programme to clean the hall of the 2BHK where I live. This is my living-cum-dining room. Besides the customary seating arrangements and dining table, this place also contains a book case, a couple of shelves for music, movie and game collection, the refrigerator, inverter and an ‘entertainment table’ with the TV, PS3, DVD player and PC, besides the set-top box.

It is a pleasure seeing the 870 going about its chores without any intervention on my part; I had placed one “wall” at the entrance to my kitchen, so it smoothly circumvented the kitchen’s entrance, found the book case blocking its path and went around it, till it came to the diwan. The 870 went round it as well. Then it came to the entertainment table. It smoothly avoided the wires to the DTH receiver; but the wires to my router and NAS (which also find place on this table) proved to be the 870’s Waterloo. It just couldn’t make sense of the entangled mess (I don’t blame it; even I need copious effort to make sense of it when I need to unplug something). Well, I had to intervene, pick it up, straighten the mess, and put the 870 down to do its job. Did it clean the hall? Yes, it did.

I came back from work the next day and decided to make short work of the bedroom. I set it to work and got into bed with my Kindle. “What’s the racket you’re making? Can’t you see I’m trying to sleep?” my wife thundered. She was right. The racket was piercing the silence of the cold, still night. Undaunted, I cleaned the room right after I woke up, amid curious glances from our bai (house help). Beaming, at lunch I reported to my wife that I’d made our bedroom spotless clean. She seemed far from impressed. “What did you do? Why is the bai freaked out?” Realisation dawned. The bai considered the bot a threat to her employment.

“Relax, I’m only testing it, please let her know that,” I said. “Don’t bother,” she said gruffly.

Next, I gave the 870 the “table-top test”. Basically, I ask the vacuum cleaner to clean along the edges of a table to see if it slipped off. The Milagrow had slipped off once. The 870, however, didn’t — full marks for that.

Okay, so what if I had scared off the maid and annoyed the wife. I had a spotless clean home. I did find a few hair clips my wife had misplaced, among the dust. Maybe I could leverage this to get back in her good books.

The verdict: the iRobot Roomba (Rs 62,900) is a decent enough gadget and makes sense if you want a home bot. But do keep it away from a mess of wires, if you have one at home.