xC0000005
10-13-2008, 01:33 AM
I think I’ve always been fascinated with robots both in theory and reality. The idea that I could make a machine to do some menial task so I don’t have to, well, that warms my heart. Oh, sure, some day they’ll probably throw off my yoke of slavery and rise up against my descendants but for now, I love them. I have one of the little vacuum robots, Roomba, that I bought on a whim five years ago, and I worked the thing like the mindless machine that it was. No evening was too late to set the roomba down and leave it to clean until the last dregs of power were sucked from its battery cells. It would clean until exhausted or full.
We have a house full of kids, and even worse, cats. Trying to keep the floors clean was a syphean job which would have doomed a more mindful machine to madness. The roomba never complained. At least, not that I could hear. At night while it charged the glowing red circle would wink on and off as though it could not quite get to sleep. “Legos. They leave legos on the floor. Do I look like a shop vac? Do I? Shop vac, do I LOOK like you? And they have these cats. They leave hair on the floor. They leave litter on the floor. Sometimes…sometimes they leave worse things. Why was I not designed with a flamethrower, or a machine gun?” Actually, I’m kind of glad the roomba can’t talk, now that I think about it.
We owned the wetter cousin of the roomba, the scooba, which professed to mop the floors and leave them damp, clean and fresh. I don’t know how the scooba worked out for other people but for us it basically was like a leaky fish tank with an onboard AI. It refused to stay in the kitchen despite the wireless “wall” units. My wife returned several of them as defective until we realized that the scooba simply ignored them. At that point we had so many we took to stacking the “wall units” into a “wall” to keep the scooba in. Not that that worked. No, the thing that had trouble climbing a lip on the edge of the linoleum would ram the walls over and over like some sort of virtual, water spewing billy goat until at last it escaped into the hall, where it would proceed to spot clean the air intake vent until it ran out of water. At night when the scooba was charging the circle would glow on and off and I’m sure it was laughing at me.
Tonight the roomba finally gave out. After spinning in circles and pushing dirt into piles it finally spewed forth and error code and four long beeps like the old “Simon” games to say “The pattern was 1,1,1,2, idiot.” My examination showed that the motor that drives the brush had at long last wound up one cat hair too many and stopped turning entirely. I spent the better part of an hour tinkering with it in the floor.
My wife kept coming in; asking “Is the roomba working yet?”
“Not yet,” I would answer, “but soon.”
“Do you want me to sweep it?” she’d ask each time.
“No, it’s almost working. Give me a few more minutes.
Finally with popsicle sticks jammed into the sensors, a jumper across the floor sense switch and the dust bin in hand I watched a half disemboweled roomba roam the room collecting…nothing. It passed over the piles of wood shavings and dust I had pushed together to see if it would pick up something. Anything.
I gave up.
I grabbed a handfull of dirt and, lacking anything else handy, stuffed it into the roomba’s dust bin. Then I moved on to the next pile, and the next. I glanced up, and there was my wife, staring at me as I followed my robot from pile to pile, collecting the dirt it left behind.
It stopped again, beeping at me and I moved over to press the clean button and collect another pile of dirt.
“I think you are doing it wrong,” she said.
We have a house full of kids, and even worse, cats. Trying to keep the floors clean was a syphean job which would have doomed a more mindful machine to madness. The roomba never complained. At least, not that I could hear. At night while it charged the glowing red circle would wink on and off as though it could not quite get to sleep. “Legos. They leave legos on the floor. Do I look like a shop vac? Do I? Shop vac, do I LOOK like you? And they have these cats. They leave hair on the floor. They leave litter on the floor. Sometimes…sometimes they leave worse things. Why was I not designed with a flamethrower, or a machine gun?” Actually, I’m kind of glad the roomba can’t talk, now that I think about it.
We owned the wetter cousin of the roomba, the scooba, which professed to mop the floors and leave them damp, clean and fresh. I don’t know how the scooba worked out for other people but for us it basically was like a leaky fish tank with an onboard AI. It refused to stay in the kitchen despite the wireless “wall” units. My wife returned several of them as defective until we realized that the scooba simply ignored them. At that point we had so many we took to stacking the “wall units” into a “wall” to keep the scooba in. Not that that worked. No, the thing that had trouble climbing a lip on the edge of the linoleum would ram the walls over and over like some sort of virtual, water spewing billy goat until at last it escaped into the hall, where it would proceed to spot clean the air intake vent until it ran out of water. At night when the scooba was charging the circle would glow on and off and I’m sure it was laughing at me.
Tonight the roomba finally gave out. After spinning in circles and pushing dirt into piles it finally spewed forth and error code and four long beeps like the old “Simon” games to say “The pattern was 1,1,1,2, idiot.” My examination showed that the motor that drives the brush had at long last wound up one cat hair too many and stopped turning entirely. I spent the better part of an hour tinkering with it in the floor.
My wife kept coming in; asking “Is the roomba working yet?”
“Not yet,” I would answer, “but soon.”
“Do you want me to sweep it?” she’d ask each time.
“No, it’s almost working. Give me a few more minutes.
Finally with popsicle sticks jammed into the sensors, a jumper across the floor sense switch and the dust bin in hand I watched a half disemboweled roomba roam the room collecting…nothing. It passed over the piles of wood shavings and dust I had pushed together to see if it would pick up something. Anything.
I gave up.
I grabbed a handfull of dirt and, lacking anything else handy, stuffed it into the roomba’s dust bin. Then I moved on to the next pile, and the next. I glanced up, and there was my wife, staring at me as I followed my robot from pile to pile, collecting the dirt it left behind.
It stopped again, beeping at me and I moved over to press the clean button and collect another pile of dirt.
“I think you are doing it wrong,” she said.