Well this floated in my facebook feed today and my facebook-bubbled world goes crazy

Dyson finally announces a robot vacuum cleaner! - theverge

IMHO, as an ex-iRobot user, and certifiable lazy human being, ahem, no.

The “problem” with robot vacuum cleaner (and the problem to solve if you’re thinking of re-inventing one) is not if your robot can see better, can move faster, suck the floor cleaner, reach further into the corners, cover every inch better, map the house better, etc performance related aspects.

No.

What’s the advantage of a robot vacuum cleaner vs any other methods of cleaning the floor?

It is cleaner? Nope. It is faster? Nope. Covers more floor area? Nope.

Answer: it doesn’t require supervision. You schedule it once, it wakes up, it runs around on its own, cleans everywhere, returns to park and recharges itself, repeat. OMFG! It is a cron job! Write it once and I’m set! For life! I don’t even remember how many cron jobs I have, but that’s the point right?

That’s the robot vacuum cleaner advantage, in theory.

But it isn’t a cron job, and you’re not set for life. Instead, for the rest of your life, you are set to pick up that robot, after every N times that it has done its rounds, to empty its days-old dirty dust bag/container, clean its now-days-old-dirty brushes and throw those dirty away. If you fail to clean your robot punctually, your dirty robot will be going around the house, like you’d scheduled it, and dirty your house everywhere, return to park and recharges itself, repeat. HAAA! Take that, yo! Who’s scheduling who now?

So, no. Save the frenzy for when you see a robot vacuum cleaner that’ll finally clean itself too.

For now, I’m filing this under #SolvingTheWrongProblem #HeyOurVersionOfCronRunsYourJobFasterButYouNeedToSuperviseIt