Why Don’t Hotels Use Roombas?
freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com
freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com
Speed, capacity and throughput come into play.
I only need to clean 1 living quarters where as a maid service in a hotel has to do dozens, every day. The roomba would have to be at least as fast as the human and it is not. That's OK for home use since I'm at work so it can take all day if it wanted to. That wouldn't work out so well at a hotel where throughput matters more.
This sounds like an interesting problem for someone in operations research to tackle. I can conceive that a roomba might be useful in a hotel (for example, when the cleaning staff is going at the bathroom, let the robot loose in the room) ... but it would require some time and money to study it.
Perhaps a system where the floor has embedded RFID tags with unique serial numbers to help make the robot's job easier and more efficient, and a larger capacity bin and battery.
I'm sure iRobot is thinking about this.
There might be a little lag at the end of the shift though, depending on the amount of time the Roomba took to vacuum and the amount of time she took to do everything else, so she'd probably just vacuum the last room or two by hand depending.
Nonetheless, the idea is dumb for many other reasons.
Alternatively, have a cart-sized Mothership robot with the above facilities. It could go down the hall and dispatch Roombas, which would enter through a "Robot-door" disguised as a kickplate and equipped with a wireless lock. The Mothership could implement battery-swap to maximize the duty cycle of the Roombas.
The only way to find out is to actually run a simulation. I don't think a cleaner would have to carry multiple robots, just multiple batteries.
I bought one for my wife. I kind of think of it as a pet.
When you say look after them, what do you mean? I clean the brushes out about once a month and that takes a short while. The bin seems to need emptying about as often.
mattmaroon (see blog post above) appears to be unable to follow the instructions included with the Roomba, so he doesn't like his. This is interesting because this is the same argument ("it's too hard") you hear about other cool things, like emacs, vi, CL, etc.
Anyway, I like mine. I start it when I shower and I emerge to have a clean apartment. I have a small apartment, though. Yes, it needs to be emptied every few days (and the cat hair removed from the brushes), but that takes all of 5 minutes -- much less time than vacuuming manually would have required. (The reality is that when I didn't have a Roomba, I just never vacuumed. Gross.)
My primary reason is that they get stuck on cords easily, and I have too many of those to be worth the hassle of concealing.
You're one geek with a lot of cords. Most people aren't like you...
It'd be a crackhead's paradise -- find the nearest hotel, break two room windows in, and score a cool $600 worth of electronics in a few minutes. Score!
I think the hotels that would use this first would not be the motel in the drug district, but rather a high-rise in some city. If you can break into a 10th story window, I guess you can have the Roomba.
Currently, theft of this variety doesn't appear to be a real problem; there is tons of expensive stuff in hotel rooms right now. Video game systems, flat-screen TVs, mattresses, etc. The Roomba would be easier to steal, but I doubt it would become a common occurrence.
Besides, in my imagined version of how this would work, the door to the room would be open while the Roomba is doing its thing, and the maid would probably hear the window breaking. (There wouldn't be a Roomba in each room, the maid would just carry some when doing their cleaning, set them loose in a few rooms, wait for them to finish, repeat.)
Anyway, this just won't happen. I should have just written that initially and saved the bits used to represent this reply ;)