Tag Archives: Features

iRobot Roomba 400 Features

December 2, 2009 Admin 1 Comment

iRobot’s Roomba 400 Series is the entry-level vacuum cleaning robot. While this unit is their most basic, and lacks some of the more advanced features of the newer robots, the 400 Series is still great at cleaning your floors. Here’s a list of the included features of the Roomba 400 vacuum:

Covered by a One Year Warranty
Battery Charger
Rechargeable Battery
Cleaning Tool
Vacuuming Debris Bin
Owner’s Guide and Documentation

The Roombas are designed to handle that most boring of household chores, sweeping your floors. All you have to do is carry the robot to the middle of your room and press the “clean” button in the center of the top of the robot. These vacuum cleaners automatically adjust their height to any floor surface, be it rugs, tile, carpeting, linoleum, or wood flooring. This assures that your floors get as clean as possible. Roombas are designed to figure out how large a room is and then adjust their vacuuming time to make sure that it covers the entire floor. Also built into the iRobot vacuums are sensors to keep the robot from falling down stairs and to sense when it bumps into things. This way it can safely navigate around your room and vacuum.

All of the iRobot Roomba vacuums use a three-stage cleaning system. A spinning brush on the left hand side of the vacuum scoops dirt and debris from hard to reach places like overhangs and corners. On the bottom of the vacuum are counter-rotating brushes that grab larger bits of debris, hair, pieces of grass or leaves, and of course dirt. Finally, the robot has a vacuum to suck up smaller pieces of dirt and dust.

Features of the iRobot Roomba 400

(Click here to see a page explaining all the iRobot vacuum cleaner features.)

Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Warranty: 1 year
Charging Time: 7 Hours
Detects Dirt: No
Spot Mode: No
Max Mode: No
Self-Charging Home Base Compatible: Yes
On-Board Scheduling: No
Voice Demonstration: No
Light-Touch Bumpers: No
Advanced Anti-Tangle Technology: No
Improved Edge and Corner Cleaning: No
Room-to-Room Navigation: No
High Capacity Bin: No
Easier Maintenance: No
Wireless Control: No
Lighthouse Technology: No
Virtual Walls Included: 0
Lighthouses Included: 0
Wireless Command Center Included: No
Extra Brushes: No
Carrying Case: No
Extra Filters Included: No
Bonus Accessory Kit: No

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Robot Features

iRobot Create Project: Hamster-Guided Roomba

October 23, 2009 Admin

This is admittedly old news, but it’s definitely cool enough to post here. Among the many products they create, iRobot has a robotics platform for eduction and tinkering that is called the iRobot Create. See here for a thorough review of this item and a page of different projects they have done internally with the iRobot Create. Among these projects is an amazingly amusing hamster-guided Roomba vacuum cleaner.

It’s hard to make out the mechanism they’re using on this robot project, but it looks like the ball is on some rollers. The rollers are probably hooked up to an optical encoding system, a lot like how the old fashioned computer mice with the balls worked. The Roomba is programmed to adjust its speed and direction to match that of the hamster.

Now all they have to do is figure out how to train the hamster to vacuum the most dirty parts of your floor. Maybe there would be some way to train the hamster to follow your shedding pets or messy kid around the house. Either way, I find it fascinating and amusing at the same time.

Robot Features

Roomba Pet Series 532 and 562 Features

September 10, 2009 Admin 2 Comments

There is a new iRobot Roomba on the block. It’s the 532 Pet Series Roomba. As the name would imply, the pet series robot vacuum cleaners are for pet owners. So people with cats and dogs, and the kinds of uniquely canine and feline messes. Cat food, kitty litter, dust bunnies made of hair. Short hair, long hair, and sticky hair. The nice thing with the robot is that you can vacuum every day and keep on top of it. Most obviously, they are designed to pick up pet hair and also the allergens that pet owners face. The iRobot Roomba 562 is designed to clean up to four regular-sized rooms before it needs to charge. Like all other Roombas, it can get into hard-to-reach areas. It comes with two virtual lighthouses and two cleaning bins which can be used in place of one another. One of the bins is a vacuuming bin. The other is a high capacity sweeper bin. As the name would suggest, the high-capacity bin is for heavy duty cleaning in especially hairy areas. Here are some of the features of the Roomba 562 robot vacuum cleaner:

Comes with two virtual wall lighthouses
Rechargeable Battery
Self-Charging Home Base
Two Brush Cleaning Tools
Extra Set of Brushes
Vacuuming Debris Bin
Sweeping Bin is High Capacity
Two Extra Filters
Has three Cleaning Modes
Covered by a Two Year Warranty
3 Hour Charge Power Supply

The Roomba 562 is one of the iRobot robot vacuum cleaners that is able to charge itself in three hours (the charge time for most of the others is seven.)

Like all the iRobot products, the Rhoomba robot vacuum cleaner 562 will avoid cliffs and detect dirt. Here is a feature list for this robot vacuum. (See here for our guide to the Roomba Features.)

Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Warranty: 2 year
Charging Time: 3 Hours
Detects Dirt: Yes
Spot Mode: No
Max Mode: No
Self-Charging Home Base Compatible: Yes
On-Board Scheduling: Yes
Voice Demonstration: No
Light-Touch Bumpers: No
Advanced Anti-Tangle Technology: Yes
Improved Edge and Corner Cleaning: Yes
Room-to-Room Navigation: No
High Capacity Bin: No
Easier Maintenance: No
Wireless Control: Yes
Lighthouse Technology: Yes
Virtual Walls Included: 0
Lighthouses Included: 2
Wireless Command Center Included: No
Extra Brushes: Yes
Carrying Case: No
Extra Filters Included: Yes
Bonus Accessory Kit: No

The iRobot Roomba 532 is just like the Roomba 562 except for the following:

No On-Board Scheduling
No Wireless Control
No Lighthouse Technology
Virtual Walls Included: 2
Lighthouses Included: 0