Vacuuming is such fun, I could watch it all day

We have a new addition to the household. A robot!

It's a Roomba vacuum cleaner... we've been eyeing these things up for ages and finally took the plunge at the weekend (Costco have a very good price right now). It is so cool; you literally just hit the 'clean' button and it goes and cleans.



It is covered in sensors and knows when it is going to run into something (walls etc) - it slows down before it makes contact. It finds its way around the room, sticks its little brush into corners, navigates around table legs, scoots under chairs, and knows about not falling down the stairs (as you can see in the video above)!

When either the room is clean, or it's about to run out of juice, it will return to its docking station and chow down on some nice tasty electricity. This happens automatically if you leave it alone but you can ask him to go back to base, like this:



So what this all means is that we now spend all our time watching the robot clean, instead of doing it ourselves - hours of entertainment! ;-) Alan, of course, is biding his time, waiting to hack it...