It's not exactly an apron-donning humanoid bot rolling around in three-caster wheels, but the cloud-connected Roomba 980 is the closest thing we have to Rosie the Robot maid for the Jetsons.
iRobot has taken the wraps off its newest Roomba 980 vacuum-cleaning robot, this time offering a number of significant upgrades over its earlier versions. The most prominent of the new features is the addition of Wi-Fi, making the Roomba 980 the first Wi-Fi equipped device to be offered by the Massachusetts-based robotics firm in its 25-year history.
What exactly does a robotic vacuum cleaner need Wi-Fi for? A lot of things. iRobot has rolled out a separate mobile app to allow homeowners to control their Roomba 980 straight from their iOS or Android devices, even when they aren't at home. Homeowners can turn it on from their smartphones even when they are hundreds of miles away on vacation. Or they can command their Roomba to clean the house when they are at the office and the kids are in school, so that nobody trips over the circular robot while it does its job.
The app serves as a hub from which users can control their Roomba, set regular cleaning schedules, and view important information about the robot: such as how long it took to clean a room, how full its dust bag is, and more.
The app can control several Roombas for people who have very big houses. However, it does not allow users to use their smartphones as a remote control to direct the Roomba around, a feature that is present in the Roomba competitor Neato BotVac.
Of course, the more important question is whether it cleans well. Unlike previous releases of the Roomba, this has a more intelligent floor tracking system and low-resolution camera that allows it to accurately map the surface it is cleaning. iRobot calls the technology visual simultaneous localization and mapping (vSLAM) technologies, which allow the Roomba to clean the house in neat, parallel lines, go over particularly dirty areas or back to places it missed on the first pass, and move to the next room once cleaning in the first room is done-all without the homeowner having to pick it up.
"It can create an actual map of the home," said iRobot CEO Colin Angle during the Roomba 980 product launch. "This is important because our goal is not to clean a part of your home, our goal is to clean your entire home."
iRobot also says it has two times the cleaning power of its predecessor, the Roomba 880, thanks to its brushless debris extractors and its ability to turn into high-power mode when it detects a rug or carpet.
The Roomba 980 can clean for around two hours on a single charge. If it detects that it is running on low power, it goes back to its charging station before resuming its cleaning duties. It has virtual wall barriers to confine it to cleaning only a certain space, and it can detect the edge of a staircase to keep it from falling off the stairs. The only thing users will have to physically do with their Roomba is to pick it up and bring it upstairs or downstairs.
Of course, the new camera-equipped Roomba being connected to the cloud all the time brings up a lot of security questions; but iRobot ensures even if hackers break into the Roomba's system, they wouldn't see anything inside the homeowner's house.
"We're sort of just waiting for someone to lie and say they hacked it and put some video up on YouTube that's clearly just filmed from a GoPro sitting on top of a Roomba," says Ken Bazydola, director of Roomba product management at iRobot. "This camera doesn't see things like we do. The robot perceives its environment as a patter of light and dark points in its field of view."
The Roomba 980 is available for purchase starting on Thursday, Sept. 17, for $899. For homeowners who balk at the price tag, we suggest purchasing a good, old-fashioned vacuum cleaner instead.
Check out the Roomba 980 in action below.
