Comments on: Long Exposure Roomba Path Reveals Lovely, Inefficient Cleaning Patterns

By: Ольга

Ольга — Fri, 29 May 2009 16:37:14 +0000

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

By: Colin Fitzgerald

Colin Fitzgerald — Thu, 14 May 2009 04:38:58 +0000

…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.

By: 12-42

12-42 — Mon, 11 May 2009 12:48:03 +0000

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…

By: Zool

Zool — Mon, 11 May 2009 11:12:33 +0000

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! ;)