revenge of the robo vac

For the New Year this year my wife and I partied at home (as usual) by watching the
celebrations in the major cities of the world. We live in one of the last places to celebrate, so most of this stuff is on YouTube by the time our time comes. Short story ... Dubai wins hands down on the most impressive celebration, although London (surprisingly) gets a big applause, mainly for the impressive display of drone choreography (in spite of it's mostly trite message). Having programmed devices like these drones myself (in the not so distant past that was my career) I am blown away by this tech. I can't wait to see it applied to something that's actually useful.

And speaking of useful robo tech, the gift that I got myself this xmas (and my wife agrees it's a good one, and btw we stopped getting each other gifts years ago) is one of those robo vacuum cleaners. They've been around for a while now, and I've been skeptical of their usefulness in my household, but what the hell, they're still around and people seem to like them and the prices have come way down, so I pulled the
trigger on one that seemed to have some AI programmed into it. Yes, I was more interested in seeing how it worked than how it actually cleaned my floors, but the thing surprised me. It actually cleans the floors. And our floors are a bit challenging. We have a dog. Which brings up another robo issue. The robo has to get along
with the dog. So, not surprisingly, I chose the robo that got good reviews with pets. And it's true. Our dog gets along with the robo vac. He was very curious about it at first, but seemed to understand that it was no threat to his household dominance and basically ignores it now (I have a video showing their interaction that I'll try to remember to attach to this post).

Back to the robo tech. It's fascinating to watch. So much so that my wife and I (and our dog) did nothing else but watch this thing go around our house vacuuming the first couple of times we set it loose. It was remarkably agile, maneuvering around chair legs and penetrating under deep and low spaces of furniture. The first few runs with it I thought it was a genius. The only time it got confused was when it was trying to find the recharge dock and it got stuck navigating the multiple chair and table legs near the dock station (I violated one of the rules by not allowing the recommended distance around the base station ... who has that much room?) I was glad to see it fail at something. Anyway, since then more failures have come. Things that it seemed to negotiate easily the first few times now seem to confuse it. I've seen the poor thing stuck in a loop trying to back out of a corner that it previously had no problem with. From my limited knowledge of AI programming and my extensive knowledge of "regular" programming of devices like this, I'd say the AI part is mostly marketing. But robo vac is training me how to use it, and my floors are much cleaner now.

Video:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/E3LdW5qKkLdtng9d9