At the Grace Hopper Conference I attended last month, I went to the “Entrepreneurship: The Fundamentals (and Fun) of Idea Generation” breakout session with Denise Brosseau, President & Co-Founder, Invent Your Future Enterprises, a long-time business coach and serial entrepreneur. We went through a few of her exercises aimed to get us thinking about “mov[ing] from the seed of an idea to a real, revenue-generating business”.

One of the exercises was to take the computer and improve it in a pie in the sky kind of way; we decided on a Robot (we only had about 10 minutes). My subgroup took two categories and brainstormed:

Trend: How can we ride an existing trend to sell more of the product?
Futurize: How will the product look 100 years from now

The two popular trends we identified were eco-friendliness (”green”) and work-life balance. Focusing on the work-life balance angle, a robot built into the home that would cook and clean and do other house chores seemed like a possible idea. In my mind, the Roomba could be considered an early version.

So after careful consideration off and on for the last few years, I finally took the plunge and bought one from Costco ($279.99). As the fifth generation version, it even has a voice demonstration system with cute beeps:

And when it’s docking, I can’t help but think of a hovering spaceship:

My thoughts on my new Roomba:

1. Elevated flooring - there’s a significant climb from the hallway to the bathroom and carpeted areas and the Roomba handles it very nicely including changes from hardwood floor to carpet
2. Covering large areas - the virtual wall lighthouses are to confine the device into one area for cleaning before moving onto the next. Running it twice, it never found the bedroom in the back, despite the second lighthouse indicating that it was within range of the Roomba; it ran out of power and had to return to home base. I also started it in the far bedroom and it confined itself to that area until it eventually ran out of power.
3. Monitoring Roomba - at least the first couple times. On the first run, it tried to lock itself in the bathroom 4 times! On the second and fourth run, it got caught on raised chair legs.
4. Approaching walls - when it is headed towards a wall, it will slow down so it doesn’t ram into the wall. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work with chair legs because they aren’t always picked up by the sensor.

Although the Roomba remembers where it’s been in one cleaning session, I don’t think it has the memory over different cleaning sessions. I think it would be a very powerful product if with the scheduler feature it took more advantage of the lighthouses, cleaning different areas each session as guided and confined by the lighthouses.

Nevertheless, I like my Roomba because it does clean periodically and it will do it automatically with the scheduler. Now my place will be more spic and span with less effort. And anything that saves me time so that I can do more fun things is a good thing in my book.