Dirt Dog

I bought one of the new dirt dog workshop cleaning robots from iRobot and it arrived last week.  We are having an addition put on our house, and they just finished the drywall hanging and plastering.  The new part of the house was covered in drywall dust.  So I put the new dirt dog to the task of cleaning it up.  It had free roam in a large empty room and it was very cool to watch it move around the room.  It is very intelligent in how in covers the room, following three main patterns.  They are a spiral pattern, criss crossing the room, and following walls.  The dirt dog filled its canister at least twice with drywall dust and other assorted construction debris.  After that though it started acting erractically.  The user manual says that it can do this if its cliff sensors get dirty and to blow them out with compressed air.  I tried vacuuming the robot, which leads to my first complaint.  It is very difficult to vacuum the robot because of all the small nooks and crannies in its construction.  After cleaning off the sensor the dirt dog would work okay again for a while, but always quickly became erratic in the dusty environment.  I'm pretty impressed with the thing over all, but it needs to have a more robust sensing mechanism for determining if it is about to fall off a cliff.  In fact, quite frankly I'm not even sure why it needs to have that capability at all.  Just don't let your dirt dog in an area where it could fall off a cliff!  Even if I had to use it in such an area, I would block the cliff rather than rely on a sensor to prevent it from falling over the edge.  All the other sensors and drive mechanisms seem to be very robust.  Overall I would say the thing did a pretty good to excellent job of cleaning up the construction area.