Robot Wars

We’ve now become a 4 robot household with the addition of a new Robot Vacuum Cleaner.

Burgess our other robot vacuum cleaner lost a wheel a few weeks ago, I repaired him and he’s been doing OK since but we thought it was time for an upgrade.

New Smarts

The new one is very similar so many of the consumables such as brushes and filters that we had for Burgess will work with it. There are some differnces though. For a start the new one has a few more ‘smarts’. It has Wifi and Bluetooth so can therefore be controlled, configured and tracked via an app. It also has a few more modes, including a ‘Smart’ navigation mode where it draws it’s own little map of our floor plan that it then uses to make sure it achieves efficient coverage and to help him find his way back to the charging station.

The app also porovides more control over scheduling and gives feedback on the life of consumable etc. Also, if he gets lost you can use the ‘Find my Phone’ style Seek Robot feature to find him again.

Charles

Oh, I referred to it as ‘him’ because we’ve called this one ‘Charles’. No, we didn’t name it after the newly crowned King Charles III, it’s actually named after Charles Doolittle Walcott, the American palaeontologist and  administrator of the Smithsonian Institution. Charles Doolittle Walcott is famous for his discovery in 1909 of well-preserved fossils, including some of the oldest soft-part imprints, in the Burgess Shale of British Columbia, Canada. Burgess, our other robot vacuum was named after the Burgess Shales so it seems fitting to name this one after something else associated with the Burgess Shales – yes, wecan be a bit geeky at times!

Mopping

The other major new features that Charles has over Burgess is a mopping function. We can remove the dust collector, replace it with a water tank and send him out to mop the floors that he has just vacuumed. It’ll work well in our house as we have have a continuous run of hard flooring through the hall, and into the beach room, kitchen, utility and bathroom. We can easily close the doors to the carpetted bedrooms, office, lounge and dining room when we send him out to mop.

I have to admit that Anna and I did watch him mop the kitchen last night just to see how well he did it!

Retirement

So, Charles has replaced Burgess as our main vacuum cleaning and mopping robot. He joins Hector and Harriet our two lawn-mowing robots. Burgess meanwhile will enjoy a happy retirement in the conservatory. He can enjoy lazy days in the sunshine and just occassionally relive his youth by heading out to vacuum just the single room.

Now, if we could find a robot that would empty the dishwasher that would be great as our 17 year human that is supposed to do it seems to be broken!! We do get na occasionaly grunt from him and the dishwasher does sometimes get emptied but it’s rarely a complete job and more often than not it’s takes at least 5 requests before he does it!!

Tags: Robots