| We have a Roomba at home, from photo search looks like irobot 880. It only makes it back to its home base less than 50% of the time. Other times it may be stuck in following ways: -stuck on rounded foot of bar stool. Why not drive backwards to get off it? -stuck under radiator with backside lifted up a bit. Why not drive backwards as soon as it felt the resistance? Less avoidable: -stuck in room where it closed the door by pushing against it but obviously couldn't open it anymore -stuck by having tried to suck up a tshirt or cable or similar Also, when trying to make it dock its homebase, it sometimes misses it by a few centimeters, and in that case,
instead of simply driving backwards a bit, then forwards again with better aim, it instead rotates around 180 degrees, drives really far, and can take a very long time to go for the home base again. Why not just drive backwards a bit? And then, it has a hidden mode, where it doesn't clean despite being scheduled. This mode will randomly sometimes enable when its battery was empty (which it is often due to the above reasons). To disable this mode, there is no simple button or UI or anything, instead the mode is disabled by making it clean for at least 1 minute. Since there is no indication when it's in this mode, the only way to find out is by noticing that it was not stuck under radiators or on bar stools for many days in a row so probably it has not been cleaning. Also, it has no separate battery for the time. So if it got stuck and battery got empty, the time resets. Annoying! I really think some simple programming fixes (learn to drive backwards for example and no hidden modes with bad UI) and a separate battery for time would already make it so much more useful! Why don't they do that? |