Long Exposure Roomba Path Reveals Lovely, Inefficient Cleaning Patterns
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 11 of May , 2009 at 5:01 am
Signaltheorist’s vaccuum cleaner ‘bit the dust’ ::snork:: so he went out and got himself a Roomba. Instead of oohing and aahing over it’s adorable little beeping noises like the rest of us, he decided to do a little bit of visual experimentation:
Now here’s something interesting, I set up a photo camera in my room, turned out all the lights and took a long-exposure shot of my roomba doing it’s thing for about 30 minutes. The result is a picture that shows the path of the roomba through it’s cleaning cycle, it looks like a flight map or something. It really hits every spot!
While it’s true that the Roomba does seem to cover every spot on the carpet (as advertised), it’s pretty inefficient at doing so. The coverage is random, which iRobot sort of promotes as a feature in that on average the robot will vacuum every part of the floor about three times. But as you can see, what “about” means in actuality (or at least, in this specific case) is that some areas get lots of coverage, and some barely get any. Is it better than doing it yourself? Well, yeah, but this picture illustrates why you still have to heave a big sigh and drag out the other vacuum every once in a while.
[ Signaltheorist ] VIA [ Doobybrain ]
Comments (4)
Category: Consumer
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Comment by Zool
Made Monday, 11 of May , 2009 at 6:12 am
Its a fascinating image. I’ve wondered for some time about the paths the vacuum cleaners take on the floor. The paths could be made shorter in theory, but I wonder if they do it for a different reason as they must have researched it a lot. It could be they vacuum the brush like bristles in carpets repeatedly from different directions, to dislodge dirt more efficiently from one direction than from another. Doing multiple approaches from different directions would stochastically over time give a better cleaning of the carpet. (I’ve also noticed this doing it the old fashioned 20th century manual way … well I have to think about something else when doing such a boring job! ;)
Comment by 12-42
Made Monday, 11 of May , 2009 at 7:48 am
It also might depend partly on what obstacles it has to avoid; every household is different, so maybe it’s the best way of doing it the majority of the time…
Comment by Colin Fitzgerald
Made Wednesday, 13 of May , 2009 at 11:38 pm
…or because location and mapping (SLAM) is hard and the little Roomba, impressive as it is, doesn’t have that kind of computational power.
However, it is interesting to note that many of the intersections in the pattern have more then two lines crossing… curious…
I’m currently working on this very kind of problem and I can tell you, it’s non-trivial !!
In reality, the ‘random’ isn’t that bad. Statistics tells us that over the long term, random is easy and pretty uniform.
Comment by Ольга
Made Friday, 29 of May , 2009 at 11:37 am
The coverage is random, which iRobot sort of promotes as a feature in that on average the robot will vacuum every part of the floor about three times