We just got a new robot vacuum for my wife’s birthday (EcoVac Deebot).  I think this sums up the basic algorithm, dating back to 1985.

(Experimenting with embedding a YouTube video – I haven’t tried this before in WordPress.)

The Deebot seems to be working good so far, though it hasn’t had a chance to do much uninterrupted cleaning yet.  My 2 year old loves it and likes to use the remote control.

This kind of robot really isn’t that complicated, and it makes me think the only reasons we didn’t have these back in 1985 were battery power and marketing.  Batteries have gotten much better, which is needed if you are going to clean a whole room, but with a charging station it doesn’t have to last through the whole house.  And marketing is all about the economics of someone being able to make a large enough profit on each one sold to make it worth manufacturing to make it worth their while to convince you that you have to have it.  This model was quite a bit cheaper than an iRobot, but has some of the good bells and whistles.

Algorithm wise, there doesn’t need to be too much more than a simple remote control bump-and-go car.  Yes, it does need to have a homing feature to be able to recharge, so that is a good feature.  And some intelligence to know if there are areas of the room it could explore more.  But this model doesn’t do anything fancy with an invisible map on the ceiling or special markers around the room.