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Roomba 560 from iRobot is a vacuumcleaning robot.

Here it is seen running.

And here it is seen “sleeping” in its docking station. The orange light shows that it is recharging its battery.

Roomba takes up a little of your time now and then, when it is time to clean it.
Most of its joints can be disassembled, so hair and dust can be removed.
This cleaning process is the only “user time” needed to run Roomba. It takes approximately 5 minutes 2-3 times a week to do it.

The Roomba has a tendency to fold carpets. This however is usually not a great problem, since it can unfold them again, when cleaning from the opposite direction.

Wires on the floor seem to be a bit of a problem. Roomba winds up in them, and tends to drag them along with it, worst case, making things drop to the floor. This problem calls for rather untraditional solutions, as the one shown above, where the wire to a floorlamp has been taped onto the pole, thus running in mid air.

Door mattes usually come in dark gray or black colours. This is a problem to Roomba, since its cliff sensors works by sending light onto the surface on which it is running, and interpreting on the reflection. A black matte therefore makes Roomba think it is about to dive off cliff.
To solve this mattes in lighter gray can be used.
Another matte problem shows itself, when the matte is a lightweight matte (non rubber). Here Roomba tends to push the matte around, instead of vacuuming it. We have solved this problem by sticking the matte to the floorboards using tesafix.
The above image to the left illustrates our front door matte, which has a light enough shade of gray for Roomba to work with. The right one shows our sticky mattes.

Some furnitures has legs not exactly high enough for Roomba to run under. This can easily be solved, using leg extensions. If you do not wish to use leg extensions Roomba will just hit the lower edge of the furniture and is not going to clean under it, or it may, in the worst case, get stuck, it the furniture has an inwards-sloped underside, such as our sofa bed on the left.

Even though Roomba 560 has wall sensors making it slow down as it approaches a wall, it may not work as well as you could wish for in all cases. For instance if the object Roomba is approaching has a very dark color (same problem as with the cliff sensors) or if it is approaching at an angle. Therefore, to protect the bumper and wall sensor casing in the front of the robot from excessive damage, we have shielded the sharp corner of the stone supporting the column in the lefthand image. By the way, the stone is there in the first place in part because the column supports a heavy plant and we were unsure of whether Roomba was able to hit the column so hard that it would topple over, and in part because the lower shelf of the column was low enough that Roomba would drive up onto it, but high enough that it would also sometimes get stuck there. This poses another problem - if your doorways have thresholds you may not be able to use Roomba. It is able to get over thresholds if they are not too high (1-1½ cm) or if you have slopes leading up to them, but if the thresholds are higher than this, or if you are unlucky that Roomba hits the slope at an angle, it may get stuck. One solution to this is preventing Roomba from approaching the threshold, for instance as shown in the righthand image of an open shoe cupboard having a homemade plastic barrier taped to it, or by placing other types of obstacles in or in front of the doorway. This can also be solved using lighthouses to define Roomba's cleaning area (see below).