1. Stair performance: Good most of the time, but I can't leave it alone in a room with stairs. I am currently staying in split-level 2-story condo. It's kind of designed weird, with steps going down into different sections of the room and into different sections of the condo (think of it as a skinny vertical apartment). I'm watching it do a cleaning cycle as I type this and I've already seen it have 3 problems with the stairs: (1) it will go too fast head-on and kind of trip into a balancing act at an angle on the stairs and beep at me, (2) it will simply fall off the stairs (it just did a full flip onto the next floor and started vacuuming again, lol), and (3) a tire will slip off the edge and hang down, prevent the Roomba from moving. I think that this problem could be solved with the addition of a long-range cliff sensor, maybe an IR beam that shoots out from the existing receiver on top of the Roomba to see if the floor is level a foor or two in front of the Roomba. As I understand it, the Roomba already has a wall-detecting system, so why not a long-range cliff-detecting system?
2. Small dust bin: My dust bin fills up whenever it cleans up one room. I can't really think of a solution to this, however. They can't make the dustbin bigger without making the Roomba bigger - and we don't want that because it fits under furniture and other areas so well now. On the flip side, I really love how easy the Roomba is to clean - the dustbin is cake to empty and the bristles pop right off for easy maintenance.
3. Cord problems: My Roomba likes to drag around cords. It won't eat them, but it likes to suck on them and take them with it on trips around the room. Maybe iRobot could implement a line-following system so it doesn't eat your lamp or stereo cords. My other gripe here is the home base, which requires the normal charger to be plugged into it. It's a nice money-saving design for iRobot, but now I have 6+ feet of cable with a power brick scrunched up next to my home base...it not only looks unsightly but the Roomba tries to eat the wires when it's vacuuming near the base. This is more of a personal gripe because I can see the long cord being useful for certain areas of the home where a power plug isn't nearby. If they could integrate the power brick into the home base, that would be awesome. I'd also like to see some kind of cable management system. A self-winding system would be great but probably too complicated and expensive for such a little device, so maybe there could be some prongs to wrap the excess cord around the back of the base like an upright vacuum system has.
4. Virtual wall field: My Roomba won't go anywhere near the Virtual Wall. It's like it shoots out a huge cone-shaped field...I can distinctly see where the Roomba avoided the Virtual Wall, which I placed in the kitchen so that it would stay in the dining room. I'd like to see a Virtual Wall with a more focused beam. I've also read of issues where the Roomba doesn't see the wall and goes right past it. Maybe if they put in multiple IR emitters, like one above and one below the existing one in the Virtual Wall, then it would cover a broader vertical range to ensure that the receiver on the Roomba gets hit, regardless of the height of where the receiver is.
5. Poor battery life: This is one of the things I'm most disappointed by. My rooms aren't particularly big, but the APS battery is nearly completely drained after doing a single room. I guess there's not really much to be done with this issue at the moment, however. The Roomba has it's own processing system and sensors along with a drivetrain and a vacuum system, so it's a wonder it lasts as long as it does now.
6. Short ceiling detection: My Roomba has lost power in some of the oddest places. The other day I found it chilling under a couch. I would like to see some sort of "short ceiling detector", like an IR beam that shoots out of the top of the receiver to see where the ceiling is. If it detects anything that within maybe 12" from the top of the robot, then it will drive itself to a more open area before quitting. I'd love to get a Roomba for my grandma, but when I took it over to her house it decided to pass out all the way under one of her couches. She's older and couldn't bend far enough to get it and wasn't strong enough to move the couch herself. I could solve this by putting a 2x4 under the front flap, but you get the idea - couches aren't the only places it can hide!
7. Anti-stuck system: My Roomba has gotten itself stuck in some of the dumbest places. In the last cleaning cycle, it got stuck between the piano bench and one of the piano legs (upright piano). It kept spinning itself around to get out but couldn't figure out how. I think if they implement a TiVo feature - 15-second instant replay - they could solve many situations where the Roomba gets stuck. For example, if my Roomba had recorded the last 15 seconds of how/where it drove around, then it could simply reverse those directions to get itself out of being stuck. It obviously wouldn't work for all situations, like if it got stuck on a thick rug, but it could help out if it gets trapped under a chair or table. Also, I think a "power-push" system would be nice - one or two of my rugs are just thick enough that the Roomba can't get over them sometimes, but if the Roomba could give a temporary "turbo boost" to push itself up and over, it would be fine. One last solution, possibly putting a small gyro on the rear of the Roomba for when it gets stuck on a lamp base or when it's balancing on the edge of the stairs, so it could flip the back end down and back itself out.
8. Improved weight distribution: This could also be titled, lighter wheels. This is a tricky one. My particular carpet is kind of a medium off-white carpet. It looks and feels nice, but the Roomba leaves tracks EVERYWHERE. It looks like we've been moving furniture around on the carpet all day when the Roomba is done. However, my grandma has thinner off-white carpet and you can hardly tell where the Roomba was, aside from the occasional circular vacuuming pattern that the beater brush left in the rug. That actually looks kind of nice, it gives you that "this room has just been vacuumed" feel. I'd like them to release a Roomba that makes it look like a tiny tank hasn't drive all over my carpet. Lucky for me this place is only temporary and I will be moving in a year or two.
I've only had the Roomba for a couple days now and I love it, although after reading this post you might not think so
I think that what I'm mainly looking for is improvements in the automation side of things so that the Roomba would be a lower hassle to place in a room. I won't let my Roomba work in a room with stairs unless I'm doing something in an adjacent room, because I don't trust it not to get screwed up and fall down or get stuck. I don't mind clearing out the chairs and other movable obstacles, but I can't do much about stairs or huge wad of home base wiring. So...what improvements would you like to see?
