Duncan Bell is robot ready

At last, the robot cleaning revolution we were promised is here… almost…

If there’s one area of technology that’s improved the most in the past decade, it’s probably mobile phones. Boring But if there’s another tech branch that’s gone up in the world o’er whatever arbitrary amount of time you care to think of, it’s been the robot vacuum cleaner.

The earliest robot vacs were rather magical, in that here you had a little disc that scurried about sucking stuff up. Unfortunately, they were also like magic in the sense that they didn’t work in real life.

Let me tell you a true story. About eight years ago, I got locked out of my house by a robot vac. It was so stupid, it didn’t know what a door was. So while I was out, it kept on ramming into my apartment’s bathroom door, until it managed to wedge it against my front door. Admittedly that is also a bit of a design flaw with my flat – I have a big door-mounted coat rack on that door now, so it can’t happen again.