Roomba Rools!

Many of my friends have asked me what I think of our Roomba.
Short answer: I love it!

Long answer: Here’s a proper review.
Our Roomba is a Roomba Discovery. It came with two virtual walls (basically little infra-red projecting units that tell the Roomba not to go past them. Useful for dividing a room up or telling it to just do the hallway and not the hallway and living room and dining room and kitchen) and a home base, which charges the Roomba when it’s not running.
The virtual walls are really useful because Roomba doesn’t do very well in huge areas that are funny-shaped. I usually have it do one room at a time by sectioning off areas with the virtual walls. Pretty easy. Even better: When it’s done cleaning, if the home base is in the room with it, it automatically goes back to home base! Very spiff.
As to the cleaning: our Roomba runs on both the linoleum and the carpet in our apartment just fine. It scoops up everything from cat hair (long and short) to cat litter to cat food quite happily. Yes, our cats make 90% of the mess in our apartment.
Roomba zooms around on little wheels, with its brushes spinning to flick dirt and whatnot off the floor. It’s not a vacuum, strictly speaking – it’s really more like a robotic carpet sweeper, but presumably iRobot figured that wouldn’t sound as cool.
It has an algorhythm that helps it make sure not to miss any spots in the room, but mostly it looks like it’s zipping around randomly bonking into things (it has a gray bumper on the front that moves so it doesn’t damage the things it bumps into). One thing I’ve noticed is that it is almost never entirely satisfied with how clean the floor is. Antwon and I joke that it’s got obsessive-compulsive disorder and is muttering “unclean!” to itself as it zips around. I usually let it run until I am tired of listening to it and the floor looks clean and turn it off manually.

One definite disadvantage is that it’s not good at rugs lying on the floor. If they tip up even a little at the corners, it folds them up and then has trouble disengaging. (see pic to left) I usually pick up the rugs and shake them onto the floor then fold them up out of the way before turning Roomba loose now.
So, to sum up:

I think it was an excellent investment, given that I like the floor to be at least superficially clean but hate vacuuming. We’ll probably hire a maid service to come in a couple times a month to do a thorough vacuuming and clean the bathrooms and stuff, but we were going to do that anyway. This just lets us go longer between visits from the maids and still have a spiffy clean carpet. Huzzah.