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This is year 2009. Where’s my flying car, jetpack and my personal robot?

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Fly­ing car — sorry. Jet­pack — nope. Per­sonal Robot — check!  And it’s called the Roomba!  Seri­ously this is the clos­est you could get to an afford­able per­sonal robot today that actu­ally does some­thing useful.

I recently pur­chased the Roomba 535. Being my first Roomba, I wasn’t sure what to expect.  When the Roomba actu­ally arrived I was even more skep­ti­cal.  This thing looked puny com­pared to con­ven­tional vac­uum cleaners.

I charged it, and set it loose.  I was pleas­antly sur­prised!  This is an amaz­ing device!  Not just from a vac­u­um­ing per­spec­tive, but from a geek’s per­spec­tive as well.  I’ve built robots myself and could relate to how it worked inter­nally and it was absolutely fascinating!

Here’s a review as a first time owner and an electronics/software enthusiast.

Open­ing the box

When I opened the box, it had a small note: This robot con­tains an elec­tronic and soft­ware inter­face that allows you to con­trol or mod­ify its behav­ior, and remotely mon­i­tor its sen­sors. For soft­ware pro­gram­mers inter­ested in giv­ing Roomba new func­tion­al­ity we encour­age you to do so.

What a friendly and an encour­ag­ing mes­sage! I’m usu­ally used to rude Sony-esque war­ranty void mes­sages.  (Remem­ber the robotic pet Aibo? Sony was so against any­one inter­fac­ing or hack­ing it. Sony sent c&d notices to any fan web­site that it thought was encour­ag­ing users to hack the Aibo.  Aibo died a sad death, thanks to Sony)

The box con­tains the robot, a dock­ing sta­tion, man­u­als, a spare fil­ter, clean­ing brush and the Vir­tual Wall. (I had to pur­chase C type bat­ter­ies for the Wall as it doesn’t come with it).

The robot requires an ini­tial 16 hour charge out of the box.

Run­ning Roomba

Once I started the robot, it started off on a spi­ral pat­tern and then changed to a dif­fer­ent clean­ing pat­tern on hit­ting an obsta­cle.  The way it works is on sens­ing an obsta­cle, it slows down so as to not knock it down.  The robot has two brushes beneath rotat­ing in oppo­site direc­tions which works in tan­dem with a vac­u­um­ing cham­ber to col­lect dust. (No vac­u­um­ing bags to change!) And it does a sur­pris­ingly good job!

I was won­der­ing how it might do on a cor­ner as the shape of Roomba is cir­cu­lar.  The Roomba has a rotat­ing brush on one end which man­ages to do a decent job col­lect­ing stuff from corners.

The Roomba boldly goes where no ordi­nary vac­u­ums nor­mally goes — under beds! And does a fine job too.

Stairs.  I really wasn’t sure what the Roomba might do near stairs.  I didn’t bother to read the man­ual and didn’t know if Roomba can han­dle stairs.  Before I could run to switch it off, the robot went straight toward the stairs.  I was half expect­ing an ago­niz­ing  tumble-crash-burn sound, but it braked right at the edge and reversed course!  These things come with cliff detec­tors that knows when to stop and reverse.

I have hard wood floors and Roomba does a very good job.  I’m not sure how it per­forms on car­pets.  On small rugs it did an ok job.  But I found it worked best on hard wood floors.

What is the Vir­tual Wall?

My model of Roomba came with an optional device called the Vir­tual Wall. The VW is sort of a bea­con to restrict the Roomba to a sin­gle room.  If you dont’ have this, you could place phys­i­cal obsta­cles at the door­way or sim­ply keep the room closed! Works just fine!

The VW also has a set­ting to guide it to the dock­ing station.

Once the Roomba was done it stopped with a ‘done clean­ing’ chime.  I had done a pretty decent job.  Took about 30 min­utes or so but I had noth­ing to complain.

The creepy dock­ing of Roomba

When Roomba is about to run out of charge it seeks out the dock­ing sta­tion and docks itself for a recharge!  That by itself is pretty cool, but how it does that is fas­ci­nat­ing.  When Roomba is close to the dock­ing sta­tion, it slows down to a ‘crawl’. It sort of creeps towards the dock­ing sta­tion.  It is quite creepy and fas­ci­nat­ing to watch this!

Clean­ing Roomba

If the dust cham­ber is full, the robot stops and its clean but­ton starts flash­ing.  iRo­bot rec­om­mends clean­ing Roomba after every clean­ing job. This is more than just emp­ty­ing out the dust cham­ber.  You actu­ally have to clean the brushes of any tan­gled hair.  It is not that dif­fi­cult actu­ally but thought I should mention.

Baby’s happy

No, not the Roomba, my kid!  He just started crawl­ing and that was the rea­son I wanted the Roomba.  It is just not prac­ti­cal to vac­uum the house every week with a con­ven­tional vac­uum. And Jr crawls every­where!  Per­son­ally I think if you have a crawl­ing baby, a Roomba is a must.

A geek’s toy

If you are into robot­ics you’ll love the Roomba!  It has the usual sen­sors we use in a hobby robot.  Comes with a bum­ber sen­sor, a cliff sen­sor (prob­a­bly IR sen­sor), two inde­pen­dently con­trolled wheels with PWM and uses IR again to locate the dock­ing sta­tion.  It uses RF to con­trol the VW.

iRo­bot also pub­lished the ser­ial codes to con­trol the Roomba pro­gra­mat­i­cally.  If you are soft­ware pro­gram­mer, you can go wild with this!

But how do you con­nect your com­puter to the Roomba?  I looked at the device and I couldn’t see any port what­so­ever.  How are we to talk to this thing?  It doesn’t have blue­tooth either.  There was absolutely noth­ing in the doc­u­men­ta­tion that came with it. Yet the note was encour­ag­ing soft­ware pro­gram­mers to play with it.  Was it a mis­take?  Actu­ally no.  Roomba comes with a hid­den port!  A very well hid­den port. I pulled the dec­o­ra­tive lid on the 535 and it revealed a PS/2 style ser­ial port!

I haven’t done any­thing yet, but I’ve inter­faced robots with ser­ial ports before and this was quite fascinating!

iRo­bot has done an excel­lent job with a con­sumer robot and they are con­stantly improv­ing upon this.  They even sell a devel­oper ver­sion of this for robot enthu­si­asts called iCre­ate which basi­cally is a mobile plat­form with­out the vac­u­um­ing functionality.

As an engi­neer I’m excited, as a con­sumer I’m sat­is­fied.  Thank you iRo­bot. I, for one, wel­come our vac­u­um­ing overlords!

(image cour­tesy: Ama­zon & iRo­bot)

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Tags: 530, 535, roomba, vac, vacuum cleaner