Therapy Product

Straight out of a Richie Rich comic book comes Irona, the robot maid! This time she's here to help you do the floors. Yes, you can pick up a robot floor vacuum cleaner for yourself and free yourself for other more meaningful, creative activities.

Straight out of a Richie Rich comic book comes Irona, the robot maid! This time she's here to help you do the floors. Yes, you can pick up a robot floor vacuum cleaner for yourself and free yourself for other more meaningful, creative activities.

All you have to do is to turn the robot on. After that it deals with all the vacuuming duties by itself, no supervision required! It runs according to a program which is embedded in its circuitry. The robot can be easily reprogrammed by the user from time to time. This reprogramming can be done directly or remotely. Some robots use the Internet, others use the equally ubiquitous cell phone system to perform remote programming.

Sophisticated logic circuits scan the floor to determine the amount of dirt there, and compute the number of passes required to clean the area. The robot then moves ahead and repeats the scan. In this way the whole area designated for cleaning is covered. No more getting down on your hands and knees to clean under the bed or the couch - the robot is designed to clean all those hard to reach places.

The robot is programmed to navigate around objects, or to turn back when it reaches the end of the room. How it does so depends on the model you buy. Sophisticated but expensive models detect boundary conditions using non-contact techniques like infrared or ultrasonic. Cheaper models stop only after colliding into the obstacle. This can damage the robot as well as the furniture and the walls, so you're well advised to get a model with rubber bumpers.

The floor-cleaning robots do an almost perfect job of cleaning the floor, leaving it spick and span. They generally do suffer from an inability to clean really tight areas, especially at the edges of wall and floor boundaries, and the corners of the room. Those areas will have to be handled manually for the present.

Manual cleaning is still required for staircases and steps. The robots also have a strange appetite for the loose fringes at the edge of rugs and carpets! This causes the robots to stall, and you have to run to their rescue. All these are run-of-the-mill problems which are currently being addressed by the designers of these sophisticated robots.

The floor robot vacuum cleaners that are available today can handle all sorts of floor surfaces, and work well on carpets too. They are programmed to detect pet hair and wet patches, and clean these up in addition to normal dirt and debris.

The mobility of these robot cleaners is due to their self-contained power packs. When it is time for a recharge, the robot advises you of this by audio-visual signals. Some really brainy models scurry themselves off to the recharging station and get the recharge done by themselves! The starting price of these robots is really quite affordable. Specialty features raise the price, and according to the features they provide the price can rise to what can fairly be called exorbitant.

The biggest advantage of the robot floor cleaner is that it frees you from diverting your time and attention to this daily chore. If you look at it this way, the robot floor cleaner saves you your time. But it does take quite a while longer to do its job compared to the time it takes to do the job under human supervision. The best thing is to turn it on when you leave for work. The floors will be spick and span when you return.

Ah yes, there's also the small matter of emptying the robot floor cleaner which is still your responsibility. But this is just a minor irritant compared to the advantages of having a robot do your vacuuming for you. Not only does it save you your time, it releases you from that feeling of drudgery that is part and parcel of doing the same old job, day in and day out.