For many years we have been promised the ideal of the robotic house, or at the very least a self-cleaning house. Robots are still a long way away from performing those functions, whatever the sci-fi movies may say, but in some areas of household work, robots are starting to make in-roads into domestic chores, promising to take away some of the drab dullness of modern living.

The Roomba, made by iRobot (but nothing to do with Apple) first came on sale in 2002 and promised to revolutionize vacuum cleaning. The Roomba is effectively half robot, half vacuum cleaner, and uses a variety of internal sensors and complex electronics to vacuum carpets. Sensors on the unit itself let the robot know when it has come into contact with an object as well as when it is near objects, allowing it to avoid them or to change direction.

The robotic features themselves would ensure novelty value, but it is the addition of a vacuum cleaner function that has meant that almost three million Roombas have been sold in the past seven years. The current Roombas being sold are the third generation model and iRobot have learned much through seven years of consumer testing and feedback that has been combined into the latest model, the iRobot Roomba 610 Professional Series.

One of the great advantages of the Roomba is in its labor-saving qualities, allowing you to get on with other tasks while you get on with the rest of your life, knowing that if it does come across any problems, it will let out a sound that lets you know that it needs a little help.

The great advantage of course is that no longer do you have to worry about pushing or pulling a vacuum cleaner around the house, with the stress that often places on a bending back and shoulders. Neither now do you need to be constantly on the lookout for the right plug socket to plug in the vacuum cleaner and pulling the long mains lead out of the way of the vacuum cleaner constantly.

The Roomba is rechargeable and needs no mains cable. Its small form factor and low height also means that it is able to get into those places where you normally couldn’t often without lifting furniture up, under coffee tables and beds for instance.

Using a Roomba is as simple as placing it in the room that you want cleaned and telling it to go clean. The Roomba works by a complicated algorithm which sends it about your room, and although it may take a while to do the job, it is not time that you have to set aside yourself, but you can let it do its own thing.

If you want to, you can also use the supplied remote control on the recent models to operate your Roomba as well creating a schedule for your Roomba so you can create a vacuuming schedule while you’re out. If that isn’t enough, there is also a ‘Homebase’ setting whereby you can set your Roomba to go back to its rechargeable base for charging – brilliant if it is running low on battery power or if you have forgotten to recharge it.

We are still not quite yet at the stage of a completely robotic self-cleaning house, but thanks to iRobot with the Roomba, vacuuming is one step closer to being a job that we don’t have to worry about quite so much.