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Comment by moomin | Hacker News Reader

I always think “It’d be nice to have a Roomba”. Then I remember I live in a three storey house with lots of rugs, a single step in the middle of the hallway, children who leave toys in the front room and rugs everywhere.

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3 story house, 2 kids and several rags here - our Roomba changed our lives. It forces you (and the kids) to clean all toys in the evening, it will clean the living room every night and then I carry it to other stories as I see fit. I have also adjusted all our furniture to either sit on the floor or be "roomba tall" - and now I can not imagine how people live with that dust under a sofa or a wardrobe :)

Yes, the toys thing is great - we have the cleaning set at 10am every morning and you've never seen a kid scramble to tidy up so quickly as when she hears the robot start up!

I also have a couple of kids and have thought this would be a great side effect of getting a Roomba, but then I always think, after I clean up all the toys running an upright would only add 5% more effort to my total clean up time. Then again maybe that's a nice forcing function.

I own one 8XX model (~3 years old, I think) and can attest that "Roomba proofing" the spaces prior to operation and having furniture with high clearings and basic shape legs are kind of needed to prevent it getting stuck.

This, minus the kids. As much as I hate vaccuuming I'd love to have a roomba, but the hassle of roomba proofing the house is way too great. I live in a rather farmlike environment so the dirt in my house can range from the tiniest dust particles to anything the cats will drag inside. I would not like to have the roomba smearing around parts of a dead bird all over, I also have rather high doorsteps and I don't feel like having those roomba ramps all over my house. So at the moment, the obstacles of having a roomba are much greater than just wipping out the good old vaccuum cleaner and use 45 minutes of that day to clean on my own.

It sounds like you need a different grade of Roomba, one that avoids really nasty things and can gracefully fall all the way down stairs to go from the top to the bottom of the house.

A fair amount of machine learning is needed if a Roomba is able to do things like identify 'nuggets' left by pets, 'cat sick', mystery yellow liquids, slugs by patio doors and beheaded shrews. We as humans have no problems identifying such horrors so long as the lights are on, but for a Roomba things are not so easy.

A version of a Roomba needs to positively look for such unsavouries and report back via the app that the house is clear. This is not that far off what the other iRobot robots do - the military ones - so hang in there, one day there will be a Roomba for you.

Sure there are plenty of other ways to identify a turd without ML...

Toys and rugs are no match for our Neato, but it eats cables and unfortunately scratches the wooden floor with the metal plated contacts. So it is not possible to leave it on automated schedule. Every time the room must be cleared of cables.

I suppose every robot cleaner eats loose cables. My Roomba 700 does. And socks :).

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