I picked up a Shark Cordless Sweeper yesterday. I needed a vacuum, and this came recommended from Katie’s brother Matt. I let it charge the 20 hours needed and gave it a try. It claims to be able to run for 50 minutes. Time will tell if that claim is true. It works pretty gosh darn good. It is quite, which is very nice. I do wish that the little wall-hugging sweep was on both sides. I realize that 90% of the population is right handed, so it makes sense to put it on the right side, but it would be nice to push it down the left wall to get into those tights spaces.
The first thing I saw was that it would make an excellent platform for making a DIY robotic vacuum cleaner. The drive system can simply clip onto the little short handle and everything is ready to go! Turn it on, and let it go. I am thinking a 2 wheel drive system, with bump sensors all the way around. Give the controller a basic bump, back up a bit, turn 180 degrees using only one wheel, and go program. The robotic sweeper should do pretty gosh darn good at cleaning an in entire room systematically. If I can get the drive system to track well, I may work on a way for it to dead-reckon where it has been, and where it hasn’t hit an obstacle yet, so it will actively try to cover the entire area.
The beauty of it would be that you simply unclip the robotic part of it, and stick on the telescoping handle, and you can touch up where it missed, or pre-clean the bad spots, and let the robot do the whole room.
This is the closest I could find on Amazon.com. It looks like it has more features, and is priced less then I paid for mine. It is getting poor reviews though… I hope I don’t have the same troubles.
