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Comment by SurrealSoul | Hacker News Reader

I feel like iRobot needs to work on it's software to justify it's hefty price tag. My roomba just drunkenly roams around the house cleaning up things, but its just a matter of random luck if it gets full coverage in 1 hour, or 3 hours.

Still beats manually vacuuming though

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>Still beats manually vacuuming though

For me main cost of vacuuming is prep work not the actual task of vaccuming. Picking up cat toy string, feather toys, kids legos, random one of things. The actual act of vacuuming is fairly simple and enjoyable.

So I don't get how roomba is useful. Doesn't your roomba choke on charger wires, toys, hair ect ? I have a neato that I don't use for these reasons.

For me, the Roomba is a forcing function to keep spaces neat enough for it to work. Which is useful.

Roomba comes with this little IR laser that says "hey stupid machine don't go here". I also have some small cardboard cutouts that prevent it going somewhere where it can royally destroy itself. Then it just whirls around and picks up the hair and dust

>hey stupid machine don't go here

Wish I could also tell my kids and pets that :D

Plus, sometimes you have to go around and rescue the bot wherever it got stuck or tangled in something. If you weren't present you might have to go looking under couches to find it and carry it back to charge.

On top of that, you still have to empty the bot's dust bin and spend a good ten minutes removing the roller and cutting out the tangled hair and string from it.

If it could automate more of these steps it would be more compelling.

This is my experience too. My neato gets messed up on longhair stuck in its wheels almost everytime. I have spend a good chunk of time removing stuck hair from its wheels. I am puzzled by people who say "beats manually vacuuming", how?

Not all houses have toys strewn around them, many don't, and those kind of people (single or dual income people with no kids, possibly no pets, little free time) are the prime audience of roombas because for them it works great.

It beats manual, but I agree, it seems so much of the battery use could be better served. I would think there would be a robot where you attach a stick to it and walk it through the path you would take to vacuum the room. Then you can save paths and the robot will just run through each path as saved.

Smarter robots have existed for a long time (e.g. the Neato or the high-end Roomba model).

They create a map of your place and then clean it systematically instead of randomly like the cheaper Roombas.

This is obviously much faster, but also less thorough (lower number of passes over any given spot) and less robust (navigation easily gets confused by sunlight, dirty sensors, room changes, etc.).

> less thorough (lower number of passes over any given spot)

If the device is smart enough, thoroughness can be a choice so the user can opt for multiple systematic passes instead of being required to wait through multiple random uneven passes.

> less robust (navigation easily gets confused by sunlight, dirty sensors, room changes, etc.)

This implies that robot vacuums that are sufficiently intelligent don't exist yet.

Also upgrades to the 800 series. I have 2 of the 960's and one 800 series, the difference is their intelligence is massive, yet from a hardware perspective they're almost identical [one lacks a camera].

I pretty much want to dump my 800 series and replace it with a 900, but the cost is so insane i cannot justify it.

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