Duncan Bell loves robots
At last, the robot cleaning revolution we were promised is here… almost…
If there’s one area of technology that’s improved the most in the past decade, it’s probably mobile phones. Boring. But if there’s another tech branch that’s gone up in the world o’er whatever arbitrary amount of time you care to think of, it’s been the robot vacuum cleaner.
The earliest robot vacs were rather magical, in that here you had a little disc that scurried about sucking stuff up. Unfortunately, they were also like magic in the sense that they didn’t work in real life.
Let me tell you a true story. About eight years ago, I got locked out of my house by a robot vac. It was so stupid, it didn’t know what a door was. So while I was out, it kept on ramming into my apartment’s bathroom door, until it managed to wedge it against my front door. Admittedly that is also a bit of a design flaw with my flat – I have a big door-mounted coat rack on that door now, so it can’t happen again.
Over the years, I’ve had so many robot vacuum cleaners, and they have all been, to varying degrees, terrible at navigating and terrible at sucking debris up. Those are two quite significant flaws when your raison d’étre is to make your way around a home and clean it. It’s like having a kids’ TV presenter who looks terrible on telly, and hates kids – a state of affairs familiar to anyone who grew up in the 70s or 80s.
What’s kept robot-vac enthusiasts interested during the sector’s lengthy pupal stage is of course the belief – the dream, if you will – that one day a beautiful cleaning butterfly will emerge. A robot vac that doesn’t get lost under your sofa, blunder haplessly and repeatedly into obstacles, lock me out of my house or – as in one famous-online incident – quite literally smear dogshit all over your home.
There have been more than a few false dawns along the way. Like a lot of people, I was sure Dyson must have cracked it, when it introduced the 360 Eye. It was an excellent launch, and their arguments were so persuasive.
Alas, although Dyson’s squat little valet droid certainly sucked up stuff most effectively, it also worked with both painful slowness and invariably haphazard accuracy. I don’t think I had ever known true irritation until I watched the way that Dyson vac ‘navigates’.
You see, the 360 Eye moves in spirals until it hits an obstacle, then it tries to start another spiral. Dyson’s engineers were – and are – adamant that this is the ‘most efficient’ way for a bot to move. And if you think about it, that’s so true isn’t it? When I am vacuuming manually, I now like to spin in a little spiral that gradually spreads out until I hit a wall, then I shuffle forwards a bit and repeat. Then I get confused and give up, while bleeping plaintively.
Going in straight lines from one end of the room to the other, while navigating around or under obstacles? No thank you very much! That would be a simply ridiculous way to clean!
However, now a saviour has arisen! As you may note, the most recent issue of our sister title T3 is the Awards issue – and I have slightly cheated in choosing the winner of Best Robot Vacuum, because it’s not actually out until later this month.
That is because the Roborock S6 MaxV is like if The Beatles, Kraftwerk, and the Sex Pistols all turned up at once, when all we had at the time was Cliff Richard.
This is a robot so fiendishly clever, it can not only avoid plug strips, shoes, and pedestals – the latter in particular has repeatedly proven to be robo-vac Kryptonite – it can actually recognise them. And then show them on a map just to prove it’s recognised them! It’s also great at sucking stuff up, moves at lightning speed, is quiet, and has an app that actually works.
I’m sure for most the arrival of a great robot vac elicits little more than a shrug. But having suffered through all the genre’s long growing pains, I am practically ecstatic. TL
I once got locked out of my house by a robot vac. It was so stupid, it didn’t know what a door was.