Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
Rosie… My New Love
So I first have to say that Sunny and I have great friends. After we got engaged a few months ago, we had a handful of folks who volunteered (read: demanded) to hold an engagement party for us.
The party was this last weekend, and it was over the top: held in a candy store in Hayes Valley, we consumed more more high-fructose corn syrup in an evening than anyone should consume in a lifetime. To top it off, we strung up a couple of pinatas over the street and I had the chance to watch my fiancee beat me with a bat.
In any case, we told eveyrone who was coming to grace us with their good company and not to worry about getting anything for us. We repeated this mantra often and most people listened.
However, the day after the party, a friend of ours made an unscheduled stop by our house and brought us a big box. About eight of our friends had gotten together and bought us a Roomba 560 — a fun addition made to the BBB registry by yours truly in a trigger-happy moment with the scanning gun.
I set up the Roomba last night, named her Rosie (after the Jetson’s robot maid, of course), and gave her a run through today. Quite simply, for a robot, she’s amazing. When I was a kid, I used to build robots from kits that I thought would work kind of like Rosie — they bump into something, they make a quarter turn to the left and then go forward again.
Not so for good ol’ Rosie. She tracked along walls, spun around chair legs and made sure to clean an entire room pretty thoroughly before moving on to the other. When she rolled up on to the base of my office chair, she successfully freed herself by going forward and backward a few times.
But she is still, alas, only a robot. As such, I learned a bit about her:
- Rosie doesn’t like electrical or drapery cords. We have power cords for the 6 laptops in our house strung all over the loving room floor. She likes to pick them up and drag them around.
- Rosie doesn’t like IKEA POANG chairs. (Neither do I) The wooden chair frame is just thin enough that she thinks she can drive right over it, but gets stuck. Twice.
- Rosie doesn’t like bathrooms. She skipped right over the hallway leading to our downstairs bathroom.
- Rosie likes randomness. It doesn’t appear that Roombas map out the floor as they clean; rather they rely on some basic algorithms and count on covering the same ground again and again randomly to cover the entire area.
Regardless of these minor faults, Rosie is a welcome addition to the family. With a little strategry around where to locate her charging dock and where to place the two lighthouses (transmitters that separate rooms), and I’m confident I can get her set up to clean every other day on a schedule, sans human supervision or intervention.
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