Scooba the New iRobot Product

omly writes "iRobot (makers of Roomba) just released a sneak preview of Scooba, the lastest consumer home-cleaning robot. It will be available this holiday season for all your holiday shopping needs."

Now I can have a robot to clean just my Kitchen

[amcdiarmid]

And the one that gets stuck under the futon frame;)

Now, if it only did Windows;)

Its interesting that a company...

[manonthemoon]

seems to actual be able to balance design and technology for once. None of their tech has been particularly innovative- they just are able to package it in a usable and not-too-expensive fashion.

Its about time that some of the sci-fi "future" is actually realized in practical home bound ways.

New Roomba Owner

[superid]

We've had our roomba discovery for about 2 months. Bought on a whim, I was skeptical that it would be anything other than a novelty. Not only am I surprised, my *very* skeptical wife approves with two thumbs up.

We are pretty good about vacuuming and even still, when we let the roomba loose he can still pick up a lot of dirt. And watching him seek back home when it's (his?) batteries run low is pretty cool. I'll definitely be looking into this new gadget!

Now if it could only run Apache....

Funny name

[mpupu]

Scooba sounds like escoba in spanish, which means broom.

Re:it may be the lastest

[Reaperducer]

I miss my Roomba a lot. I used to have a 1400-square-foot loft with hardwood floors. It was one single large open room. Once or twice a week I would set Roomba off before I went to work and when I came home, it would be filled with crud I didn't even know existed. When I first moved into the place, I swept and mopped the whole floor. The next day I let Roomba go and it still managed to find tons of crap I couldn't even see. I suspect some of it came from between the floorboards.

Alas, I eventually moved to a tiny (by American standards) 600-square-foot apartment with too many walls and obstructions to make Roomba worthwhile, so I sold it on eBay. If I ever move to a larger place, I'll have to get a new Roomba.

Rugs

[bombadillo]

What does this thing due when it hits rugs? Seems pretty useless if you anything on the floor as most rooms do. As soon as the can invent a vacumm in an intelligent pattern then I will be impressed. Most houses just have to much clutter or corners for these things to work.

I am thinking a few sensors that map out your house layout to a PC. And a bluetooth connection to the vaccum. Then maybe triangulation so the PC knows where the unit is....

The technical problems with Roomba and Scooba

[CuriousKangaroo]

I own a first-generation Roomba.

Problems:

1. Battery has nasty memory-effect... didn't use the Roomba for a while, and now it will only keep a charge for 10-15 minutes.
2. Can't return to base station to charge itself. This apparently was fixed in later generations.
3. Pet and human hair clogs it too easily. I need to remove the wheels and brushes after EVERY use and clean them. The charging station should also have a "clean" cycle, like some electric razors have these days.
4. Collection bin is too small. It needs to be able to empty its collection bin at the charging station (into, say, a larger recepticle that only needs to be emptied once a week) and set onto a daily program so that you can completely forget about it. Each day it vacuums, charges and empties itself and then you empty the main bin on Sunday afternoons. This would make the whole system totally automatic, and would probably solve the battery memory-effect problem, too, since it will get consistent usage.

When they get all this fixed, let me know and I'll get another one. Not until then.

This was iRobot's first product

[po8]

The odd thing about the Scooba is that iRobot's first product was also a floor-cleaning machine. I've heard Rod Brooks tell this story in person a couple of times, and it cracked me up.

PC Magazine, for example, says [pcmag.com]:

...the company first partnered with JohnsonDiversey (formerly Johnson Wax Professional) in 1998, with the goal of producing a robot floor cleaner. Commercial floor cleaning is roughly a $50 billion business. Angle says that any floor-cleaning system involves three things: sweep, scrub, and polish. No machine on the market did all three at once, but since iRobot developers didn't want to build three separate robots, they set about creating one that could do all three. The end result was the NexGen Multi-Function Floor Care machine. The success of that project led them to Roomba.

If you read between the lines here, you get the real story: they spent a lot of time building this three-function janitor-bot with a big computer in the middle to drive it around the building. They then started showing it to potential customers, every one of whom said the same thing: "A 3-function cleaning machine? That's fantastic! Take that computer out of the middle of it and put a handle on for the janitor and we'll buy a bajillion of 'em!"

So they did. The hole where the computer had been made nice storage. Better yet, iRobot had learned a valuable lesson about disruptive technologies: small steps.