When I bought my Miele Black Pearl 2000 back in 2005, I thought that that would be my only vacuum cleaner I would buy for a long time… But, apparently, I was wrong, because this week I bought a new one…

The Roomba is not a ‘normal’ vacuum cleaner, it’s a robot! Not exactly like Rosie in The Jetsons, as he or she (I still don’t have a name for it, suggestions? :)) will only vacuum clean, but hey, it’s a start…

When activated, the Roomba will use AWARE(tm) Robotic Intelligence System to navigate through the room and clean it for you. It will use some clever algorithm to reach everywhere, take a look at these pictures.

The Roomba 560 comes with two virtual lighthouses that you can place between your rooms (at this moment I have placed them on top of my door step, so I can’t close my doors anymore, I’ll find out whether they’ll also work when I place them behind the door step). The Roomba will first clean the first room, and when it is finished, it will pass through the door step and clean the next room. After it has cleaned all the rooms it will return to the first room, and then dock itself to the docking station. When the Roomba starts cleaning, it will activate the virtual lighthouses, and when it is done cleaning it will deactivate them again, how neat!

Another cool feature is the scheduler. You can schedule your vacuum cleaner to clean at a certain time. I’ve set it up to clean my house twice a week. I haven’t seen it in practice yet, but the idea is that it will clean my house while I’m away working. So, my house will be automagically cleaned all the time.

I don’t have it long enough to say whether it really works or not (now I can’t have my stuff laying around on the floor anymore…), but it is very, very cool to see the robot in action (“The only difference between men and boys is the size of their toys”, blah, blah :)). And it sure vacuums a lot better than I do, according to the amount of dust I already found in the dirt bin.