Driverless cars and roomba
Feb. 1st, 2015 12:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutWe have a roomba. It is not the first roomba we have owned. Probably the biggest impact the roomba has (other than the obvious one, of sucking up a bunch of crap, some of it small plastic toys which need to then be rescued) is its steady destruction of the fringe on area carpets. The second biggest impact the roomba has is the amount of noise it produces. The kids don't like it, so it is programmed to run when the kids and R. are not around, and I find that it often runs when I am on the phone, which is incredibly annoying.
You might think, well, why even keep it? Well, actually vacuuming is even more annoying, and as disruptive as roomba can be, hiring a human to come vacuum is (a) a lot more expensive and (b) much more disruptive.
In theory, it should be possible to just press a couple buttons when roomba launches to have roomba smartly return to base. In practice, for a variety of reasons (probably again involving area rugs), roomba tends to miss, and then it roams around until turned off, picked up, and carefully lined up with base to be returned. Sometimes you just have to manually line roomba up with base, because roomba keeps cocking it up.
And this is by no means v1 of roomba. Seriously.
I have this vision of a driverless car future in which cars have dropped off their riders and have been notified that their next ride isn't for a few hours. In theory, they should take themselves off to base and park, maybe recharge their electric batteries or whatever, until that next ride. But instead of actually returning to base, they wander the streets for hours until their charge runs completely down, and then they stop wherever they are and wait for a rescue.
That's kind of what I think of, whenever I think about driverless cars. Roadways randomly blocked by dead battery electric, driveless cars, waiting for someone to come along and get them back where they belong so they can recharge.
ETA: I completely left out roomba's rapacious appetite for laptop charging cords. It is rapacious. Or its propensity for beaching itself on lamp bases, or nosing under couches and getting stuck.
ETAYA: Maybe I'd feel better about driverless cars if I had a Neato BotVac.
http://www.wired.com/2014/03/neato-robot-vacuums/
You might think, well, why even keep it? Well, actually vacuuming is even more annoying, and as disruptive as roomba can be, hiring a human to come vacuum is (a) a lot more expensive and (b) much more disruptive.
In theory, it should be possible to just press a couple buttons when roomba launches to have roomba smartly return to base. In practice, for a variety of reasons (probably again involving area rugs), roomba tends to miss, and then it roams around until turned off, picked up, and carefully lined up with base to be returned. Sometimes you just have to manually line roomba up with base, because roomba keeps cocking it up.
And this is by no means v1 of roomba. Seriously.
I have this vision of a driverless car future in which cars have dropped off their riders and have been notified that their next ride isn't for a few hours. In theory, they should take themselves off to base and park, maybe recharge their electric batteries or whatever, until that next ride. But instead of actually returning to base, they wander the streets for hours until their charge runs completely down, and then they stop wherever they are and wait for a rescue.
That's kind of what I think of, whenever I think about driverless cars. Roadways randomly blocked by dead battery electric, driveless cars, waiting for someone to come along and get them back where they belong so they can recharge.
ETA: I completely left out roomba's rapacious appetite for laptop charging cords. It is rapacious. Or its propensity for beaching itself on lamp bases, or nosing under couches and getting stuck.
ETAYA: Maybe I'd feel better about driverless cars if I had a Neato BotVac.
http://www.wired.com/2014/03/neato-robot-vacuums/