A Blind Cleaner

One lazy weekend, some fortnight ago, Tessa showed me a flyer from a stack of flyers that were just pushed aside in a corner of the mini-kitchen table in our house. I have seen these flyers that occasionally came through our mailbox but have not bothered to read any of them. This particular flyer caught Tessa’s eyes and she passed it on to me while enquiring if I am not interested in it. On reading it my inquisition got the better of me and started reading every detail available. I even visited the website given on the flyer. They were having a promotion at one of the shopping malls and that day, a Sunday, was the last day of the promotion. I have resolved not to go to any of the shopping malls on a weekend much so on a Sunday as the place will be very crowded and before anything else you will have to go round and round looking for parking space. Once you park your car you will have to jostle with the crowd in the elevators, escalators, and in some popular shop outlets too. Children, young and not so young, with parents chasing, teenagers in groups and young couples will be taking over most of the spaces in the complex. In short, you will not have peace shopping!! To get out of the complex will be another hassle, too many cars coming in and going out at the same time. The politicians ask us to be resilient and withstand the economic downturn. Huh! What downturn!! Are these people in the malls just whiling away their time and not shopping?

The next day, a Monday, Ram and I was out for some errands and also visited my ‘Alma Mater’ to check out some products from a pilot plant that is run on a research basis (this will be a subject of my posting later). We had some time after lunch and decided to visit the actual showroom of the product mentioned in the flyer. The showroom is located in Sunway Mas Commercial Center, a satellite town not too far away from our house, within a new development area of PeeJay North. I am not familiar with this area but I managed to get route guidance over the phone from the guy in the showroom. This guy turned out to be the big boss himself and when we arrived at the showroom he was alone, as all his team members were dismantling their stuff at the promotional site in the shopping mall. He said that they got home very late in the night the previous night and hence took their time to dismantle and sort things out this being a Monday. He proceeded to demonstrate the gadget and mentioned that he had been studying similar products for quite a number of years and only now found one that had addressed the flaws found in all the previous products.

The product is a robotic vacuum cleaner. Ram calls it the blind cleaner. It moves around according to design and would go anywhere as long as its path is not impeded. It will change direction when it touches an object or when it reaches the edge of a floor or a fall off like the stairway drop etc. The guy who demonstrated the cleaner to us has, over the past several years, studied various robotic cleaners, their design and function, their construction and most of all their performance. There were several detrimental flaws in these previous cleaners that have been removed from this particular design. One example is: when the cleaner touches an object, like the leg of a chair, or the bottom of a cabinet or anything similar, it will retract a few centimeters backwards from its path and then turn to its side. The previous ones do not retract but would turn as soon as they touch an object, and by turning it sometimes scratches the object. This cleaner is designed to move in a square direction, circular direction clockwise and anti-clockwise, zig-zag direction and cris-crossing direction. It will retract and change direction when it reaches the edge of a floor, say at the staircase and will not fall. The design comes with two sets of brushes, one rotating long brush at the mouth of the vacuum inlet and another one circular brush that dislodge dirt and dust from the floor especially at the edges. There is also an Ultraviolet light incorporated to destroy any bacteria collected.
Looking For The Charger
One interesting in-built feature is the ability of the cleaner to find its charger once the battery is almost depleted. It will move around and look for the charger and when it come close docks itself to recharge. On one occasion when it was docking I told Ram that the baby has found its mother and is now breast feeding….. ha ha ha! So, the cleaner is good to work on its own. You can leave the house when it is at work, no problem. You can even set for it to continue working after it has been fully recharged.

Baby Getting Close To Mum!!


Mum Found


Docking Onto Charger


Charging Starts,.....

We have had the set working quite well and I think frequency of mopping the floors can now be reduced, provided vacuuming is done frequent enough, thus less strain on us. If only a mobile robotic floor mopper can be designed……….. ha ha ha! wishful thinking…..

MKI Ramblings Unlimited
Petaling Jaya