Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners are somehow becoming even more cutting edge. Time Warner Cable News’ Adam Balkin explains in the following Tech Talk report.
If we're being honest with ourselves, we do not treat Roombas fairly. Most other vacuum cleaners, as long as they promise more dirt cleaning suction than the previous model, we see them as a worthy purchase.
Roombas offer that, but since they’re robots, unless they continually act more like the robots from our Sci-Fi fantasies, we tend to give them a bit of a shoulder shrug. Well, that will not be the case with the just unveiled Roomba 980, which now maps your home so it knows exactly where it is going and where it needs to go, as opposed to smartly bobbing, weaving and bumping its way towards cleaning your home.
“No matter how big the house is, this robot will create a map and then methodically go through your home cleaning it until it’s spotless,” says Colin Angle, CEO of iRobot. “The robot is using a visual sensor to find landmarks and then a sensor downward like a mouse on a computer to go estimate how far its traveled."
The mapping not only helps the Roomba clean quicker, but if it doesn’t finish the job in about the two hours it gets per charge, it’ll automatically return to its base, recharge, and then again - because it knows your home - pick up where it left off.
The other big tech improvement: you can control Roomba via a mobile phone app so that, from even away from home, you can schedule it, start it, even check to see how well it's doing. All of this new functionality though has some in the tech world thinking Roomba’s creators at iRobot are really just getting started.
“Roomba’s had these robot vacuums for a while, but it didn’t really adapt to the 'internet of things,’ the concept that your light switch is online, the concept that your dishwasher can suddenly talk to your fridge,” says Jeremy Kaplan of DigitalTrends.com. “They’ve built an app that brings it into that world and I think we’ll see a lot of compatibility in the future, we’ll see a lot more as it really delves deeper into that market."
The Roomba 980 is on sale now. Its price may very well sweep away a fair chunk of your paycheck: it runs around $900.