Monday, December 8, 2008

Roomba glitches



















In all my days as a techno-geek, I've never seen anything like this before. The Roomba I recently purchased has begun acting very strangely.

In the beginning, the new AI Roomba seemed like the answer to my dreams. It cleaned the house like a dream, provided I removed anything it could get tangled on (such as cords, pencils, random strings on the floor, etc.).

But lately, I've been noticing some very odd things about the Roomba. When I get up in the middle of the night for late-night snackage, the Roomba is missing from it's docking station. I later find it sitting dormant in another room, usually the dining room. What it's doing there, or why it left it's docking station, I don't know. Perhaps there is a glitch that iRobot hasn't fixed yet, after all, this is brand new software. Maybe the AI Roomba is the next Microsoft Vista, with all it's bugs and glitches.

Also, the Roomba doesn't always return directly to it's docking station. Sometimes I walk through the house, putting up laundry and whatnot, and see the Roomba "exploring" a room I most definitely did not leave it in. I'm not sure why the Roomba isn't going back to it's station, but I do know that it is really quite disconcerting. I don't like it one bit.

If you can put up with this weird behaviour, though, the Roomba is really quite the efficient little cleaner. I have no complaints with it's cleaning capabilities...although I may be writing Colin Angle sometime soon to discuss what the little bugger is doing acting so strangely.