Better Decisions Through Data.
For those that aren’t familiar with the Scooba, it is the wet floor washing version of the Roomba. It holds two water tanks (or really one water tank separated by a flexible divider that separates the clean water from the dirty water). It washes and scrubs hard surfaces in a way similar to how the Roomba does dry vacuuming. (The Scooba cannot wet vacuum carpets, as its sensors and wheels are designed for traction on a wet, hard surface and cannot properly navigate over a carpeted area. There is one robotic vacuum that can handle carnets, the Bissell Spotbot, although its navigational ability seems limited to a circular area. Someday, robotic wet vacuums will be able to handle both hard floors and carpets, no doubt.)
The Scooba is not as intelligent as the Roomba, apparently because navigation and dirt sensing in a wet environment are hard problems. Regardless of how dirty a floor or countertop area is, our Scooba runs for a set time, 20 or 40 minutes depending on setting, which is related to the limit of its battery and water tank. This is in contrast to the Roomba, which can figure out when it is done cleaning.
Nevertheless, we find our Scooba a tremendous time-saver. We have it repeatedly scrub an area while we do something else.
We mentioned that we’ve gotten it to wash our countertops as an ‘off-label use.’ We find that iRobot’s natural enzyme cleaner has, as its name implies, a very safe chemistry for things like granite countertops, since it is simply a biologically-derived protein cleaner (which is what “natural enzyme” means) plus some surfactant against which stone will be inert. (iRobot also sells a lysol beach version for its 390 Scooba bot, although this is not supported for our Scooba model. Bleach is obviously a much harsher chemical than an enzymatic cleaner, and wouldn’t be sure about bleach on granite; we would avoid using it on expensive surfaces without testing. The 390 adds a better pre-vacuum over the 230. This is great for floors but probably makes it too large for countertops, or at least less practical.) iRobot describes this as a “hard floor cleaner” so using it on countertops is a bit of an off-label usage, but the Scooba will reportedly loose traction if used an unsupported formula. Probably to avoid damage to the internal plastic tank “bladder” from the bleach, the Scooba 230 only officially supports the “natural enzyme hard floor cleaner” or “plain water” as the two cleaning formulas, so our choices are limited if we wanted to use our Scooba on countertops.
The Scooba will occasionally lose traction, so, unlike the Roomba, can’t be left completely unattended on countertops (although we did feel comfortable walking out of the room for 15 minutes or so while it washed the floor). In particular, use on countertops requires some clever use of virtual wall units or other boundaries. However, you can do other things while your Scooba scrubs & washes your floor or countertop.
Much needed technology: finally getting vacuum cleaners to surf the Internet
Unlike that Moneual model announced at CES, neither the Roomba nor the Scooba are yet connected to the Internet, so don’t report how much dirt they’ve cleaned to an iPhone app. We’re certain this will get added in the near future. (Perhaps someday the Roomba will also incorporate an airborne dust sensor, or be able to direct air through its carpet dirt sensor to detect airborne dust. While this might not be that useful for detecting a need to clean a carpet, it would be great for monitoring airborne pollution levels! We’d love to support Roomba or Moneaul in our dust-monitoring app!)
Traditional vacuums with dust sensors
There are also a small number of traditional (i.e., non-robotic) high-end vacuum cleaner models that have sensors that report back to user how dirty a particular area is. Humans generally can’t detect this (especially on carpets that are already very clean), and no doubt these capabilities have been inspired by the dust sensors on their robotic cousins. We’ll do a future blog post on some of these.
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So, if I understand correctly, your vacuum will monitor how much dirt it picks up from the floor? Do you end up with a spreadsheet to optimize the frequency of vacuuming? How incredibly modern!
All of the robotic vacs we mention have these dirt sensors (and the Moneual takes it a step further by trying to monitor dirt in the air and automatically determining when to start the vac, although we were dubious about how well this worked).
We see you run an on-line vacuum review site, so are surprised you weren’t aware that dirt sensors in robotic vacs have been around for a very long time. (And, as we talk about in this article, have started to get added to traditionally, non-robotic vacs.)
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The Roomba has had various dirt sensors for decades. The original was an ultrasonic sensor that detected the sound of dirt as it entered the dustbin. This adjusted the behavior of the robot. If it saw a lot of dirt entering the dustbin over a certain area, it would give that area more attention. This was a very important feature of the higher-end Roombas (the cheapest base Roombas did offer the ultrasonic sensor, but it has been part of the “early” Roomba Discovery SE etc which have been available before 2005). The more modern Roombas have even added additional sensors to help the on-board algorithms recognize areas that are dirty and also help it determine when it is done cleaning.
So having the on-board vacuum algorithmics monitor the dirt coming in (and even the dust in the air) is serious business, and vacuum doesn’t work correctly without it. We were also amused by the newer ability of these vacs to offer the ability for the user to monitor the amount of dirt vacuumed (e.g., via the Moneual’s app, which the Roomba has now duplicated). With the ability to tap into the on-line cameras on these vacs, and the addition of a direct or indirect Internet connection (which the older Roomba did not have), there are some Internet of Things security concerns, unfortunately. There is the possibility Skynet could hack into an Internet-connected vac (or your Internet-connected toilet) someday.