Over at The Register, Bill Ray talks about the robotic domestic servants in operation around his house:
We like to consider ourselves the new breed of enlightened robot owners — not hobbyists, or enthusiasts, just enormously lazy people who’d prefer to see something else doing the work. That includes mopping the floor, cutting the grass or letting the cats in, not to mention motivating the children into keeping both room and garden tidy for fear of having their toys eaten by the machines.
[. . .]
We know Mowbot can destroy toys because sometimes he does, if the children are foolish enough to leave them on the lawn: he’ll bounce off walls and larger obstacles, but he’ll give them a shove first. It was moments after I predicted he would have no difficulty bouncing off the inflatable paddling pool that it vanished in a swirling maelstrom of plastic and water droplets that was enough to ensure the children kept the garden tidy for a year or two.
[. . .]
iRobot developed the first Roomba to raise money and credibility so it could get into the far-more-lucrative military robot business, but what makes Roomba, Scooba and Mowbot useful is not how clever they are but how much they achieve with such limited intelligence.
While Dyson repeatedly demonstrates prototypes that scan the room with sonar, and Electrolux charges a thousand pounds for their Trilobite bristling with sensors, iRobot’s Roomba bounces off walls at random while Mowbot repeatedly cuts the same grass and calls it “mulching” to avoid having to pick up the bits. None of our robots is efficient, a human could do the job in half the time – but speaking as that human I’m glad I don’t have to.
We’ve been considering buying a Roomba for one particular room in our house: our bedroom. We have three cats, one of whom is utterly terror-stricken at the sight or sound of a vacuum cleaner. At the first hint of a vacuum cleaner attack, he retreats at maximum speed in a random direction, leaving a trail of urine in his wake. This means that our bedroom gets far too infrequently vacuumed. We’re hoping that a Roomba won’t trigger his flee-and-pee instincts . . .
