As part of the futuristic dream of robot housekeepers, one generally hopes they'll carry out their duties autonomously without need of their master's input. Yet one also hopes that they'll take direction as needed, like when you call them from work to say company are coming over on a whim and to make the place spick and span.
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This ability — or rather the best version of it possible in 2016 — is the main selling point of the new autonomous vacuum from iRobot: the Roomba 980. With the ability to connect to your home Wi-Fi and with a smartphone app you can use to issue commands from anywhere, the new Roomba looks and performs similarly to the existing models but puts a much finer degree of control in your hands.
This is the first Roomba I've used in my own home, and it may say more about me than the vacuum cleaner but I couldn't help but ascribe it a personality and refer to it as a 'him' as it whistled its greeting and shuttled around the floor. This was aided by the fact that it has a tendency to seem like it's wandering unpredictably rather than cleaning with military precision.
The Roomba scans your floorplan as it goes to make sure it gets every area — and by the end of each clean I confirmed that it had actually been everywhere — but its inability to move objects out of the way or manoeuvre gracefully made for a lot of awkwardness in a big house full of furniture. When it came time to put himself back on the charger, the Roomba would usually spend several minutes trying and failing to line himself up correctly before finally making it in to relax.
Still, while watching him closely gave an impression that he didn't know what he was doing, when left to his own devices the Roomba did a pretty great job of cleaning the floors, especially getting pet hair out of carpet. If I set him off before I left the house I always returned to clean floors and the robot happily docked. However this comes with the caveat that you must do a little tidying first.
Testing a Roomba. He is just not a fan of the part where the carpet meets the tiles. pic.twitter.com/IGD5oJkomk— Tim Biggs (@weeklyrift) August 10, 2016
I realised quickly that the Roomba would jump over heavy cables and room dividers, but things like cords, scarves, and socks would be dragged with potentially disastrous results. He also bumps into things and blows out a lot of air as he travels around, so papers and breakables need to be locked down. Two included gadgets can be set up to create a virtual wall if you need to keep the Roomba away from your Ming vase collection.
Specific to this new Roomba is its ability to clean a whole level of your house — returning to charge and then continuing the job if need be — and its ability to sense carpet to increase its suction power. But the marquee new feature here is Wi-Fi connectivity and the app.
When you first dock the 980 and download the app, you use it to connect the home base to your Wi-Fi. Then the app's main screen becomes a proxy for the Roomba's control panel, with the same big 'clean' button front and centre. Hit it, and not matter where you are the Roomba will begin a cleaning cycle.
The app can display messages if your robot runs out of steam, fills up its bin (I had to clear mine after every cycle) or comes unstuck in some way, but you have to actually check the app. It can't send the alerts as notifications. At first I found this troubling, but then I realised that if the Roomba did get into strife while I was at work I'd have to wait until I got home to aid him, no matter how soon I was alerted. Had I remembered to tuck those cords away?
The whole thing goes to show how infrequently you're likely to use the remote activation feature. When was the last time you realised your home needed a quick vac while you were out, but you were also confident that you had cleared away all loose items from the floor that could potentially trip up a vacuum-bot? Arriving home with friends to find a distressed robotic discus in the middle of your floor wrestling with a bra it knocked off your clothes horse is probably just as embarrassing as coming home to pet hair or a few chip crumbs in the carpet.
Elsewhere in the app, you can set various preferences like how hard it should clean (affects battery life and noise), whether it should pay special attention to edges before it returns home or if it should clean twice in a pass. You can also view diagnostics and, most handily, set a weekly cleaning routine.
Since the unit is quite noisy (it is a vacuum), you won't always want it cleaning while you're around. Setting a specific time a few days a week to clean — when you'll be able to prepare by getting loose items off the floor beforehand — will keep your place tidy and hopefully prevent you needing to resort to the def-con measure of ordering a last minute clean from afar, nice as that option is.
Roomba 980 is available at shopirobot.com.au at an RRP of $1499.
