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Vacuuming a hotel is a fundamentally different engineering problem than vacuuming a house in a similar way that a dish washer for a restaurant is different than
by sown 18y ago
Vacuuming a hotel is a fundamentally different engineering problem than vacuuming a house in a similar way that a dish washer for a restaurant is different than for a home. The washer from where I worked was a large industrial box that worked hard and fast. A home unit would have to conserve energy and water where as the industrial unit doesn't necessarily. Customers need clean dishes NOW more than the business needs to save some single-digit percentage in energy and water costs.
Speed, capacity and throughput come into play.
I only need to clean 1 living quarters where as a maid service in a hotel has to do dozens, every day. The roomba would have to be at least as fast as the human and it is not. That's OK for home use since I'm at work so it can take all day if it wanted to. That wouldn't work out so well at a hotel where throughput matters more.
This sounds like an interesting problem for someone in operations research to tackle. I can conceive that a roomba might be useful in a hotel (for example, when the cleaning staff is going at the bathroom, let the robot loose in the room) ... but it would require some time and money to study it.
Perhaps a system where the floor has embedded RFID tags with unique serial numbers to help make the robot's job easier and more efficient, and a larger capacity bin and battery.
I'm sure iRobot is thinking about this.
- mattmaroon 18y agoIt wouldn't have to be as fast as a human because it doesn't need to be watched and a maid could carry multiple of them. (In fact given their battery life, she'd have to.) She could clean room 1, release roomba 1 in it after she was done, move on to clean room 2 while roomba 1 worked, release roomba 2 after the end, etc. There might be a little lag at the end of the shift though, depending on the amount of time the Roomba took to vacuum and the amount of time she took to do everything else, so she'd probably just vacuum the last room or two by hand depending. Nonetheless, the idea is dumb for many other reasons.
- sown 18y agoIt'd be a substantial lag, I would guess. The only way to find out is to actually run a simulation. I don't think a cleaner would have to carry multiple robots, just multiple batteries.
- stcredzero 18y agoForget about the maids having to carry them at all. Build a kind of auto-recharge/clean/de-hair/emptying station into the base of the bed and have one each room. Also build an electronic "Do Not Disturb/Please Clean the Room" sign into the door which notifies the Roomba when it might be okay to activate. The Roomba would be programmed to start the cycle one hour after the guests leave in the morning. Alternatively, have a cart-sized Mothership robot with the above facilities. It could go down the hall and dispatch Roombas, which would enter through a "Robot-door" disguised as a kickplate and equipped with a wireless lock. The Mothership could implement battery-swap to maximize the duty cycle of the Roombas.