How quickly things change, eh? This throwback House Proud column from November 2009 proves it. I was so excited about technology that reads text aloud and now we live in the age of Siri, Alexa and a host of other gizmos that are part of our phones. I’d still like a robot house-keeper, though. It sure would be nice to have a robot to help around the house. On TV, The Jetsons had Rosie, their robotic housekeeper and technology is almost advanced enough to bring Rosie out of the cartoon world and into the real one. Plenty of robots are available to help with various chores inside and outside your home.
Robot vacuums have been around for several years. Roomba is a well-known brand and there are several others that can be programmed to roam your entire home or office, or just certain rooms, sucking up dust bunnies and other flotsam on the floors. They’re small enough to get under furniture and into corners. They can self-adjust for carpets or bare floors and some of them will even return to their charging stations when they’re low on juice. You can also purchase a model that allows you to start it remotely from somewhere other than inside your home. Imagine coming back from vacation to freshly vacuumed floors.
Those floors could be washed while you’re away as well thanks to another robot. It lightly scrubs, rinses and dries the floor all by itself, although it must be filled with water and soap between jobs which is a minor effort compared to completing the unpleasant chore on your own.
Now imagine a Roomba-type gizmo for your lawn. The circular mowers use the same technology as the indoor vacuum and sensors ensure it will avoid trees and other barriers on your property. It’s confined to your lawn by an unseen perimeter similar to an invisible pet fence and it’s rechargeable too. You can sit in the shade with a cool beverage while your grass is shorn to your specifications.
I can tell you from experience that all robotic pool cleaners are not created equally so a little research is necessary. There are those that float around and skim bugs and other stuff off the water’s surface and others that travel to the depths of in-ground pools to scrub the liner. The newest models don’t even require hoses or an external power source.
A robot for your rain gutter can make quicker, safer work of a job that normally requires a brave soul to get up on a ladder and clean out the guck by hand. This robot moves by remote control, on treads, like an earth-mover. A front-end auger churns through debris and brushes the eaves clean.
A security robot can be as small as a camera or as big as a fifth grader and either integrated into an existing security system or, for major corporations, a replacement for a live body. They’re touted as a safer first line of defense for a high-risk business where a confrontation with a bad guy is possible. Better a robot gets shot than a human.
Last year I came very close to buying the Nabaztag bunny robot for my beloved’s computer. However, when it came time to check-out I chickened out, unsure that he would like to start his day by having the cute little gizmo read out his emails and weather forecasts. Now there’s a Nabaztag starter pack that is a less expensive way to get into the technology and it makes everyday objects interactive. How you program it is up to you but you apparently can, for example, have your umbrella read you the latest forecast and get your car keys to remind you to pick up bread on the way home. Sounds ridiculously far-fetched, doesn’t it? Well it just goes to show that the age of Rosie is much closer than we think. Now if only I could find a robot to replace me at work, I’d be able to stay in my house and play with the home robots.