Karcher's Robot Vacuum Cleaner Lives?

Posted 14 Nov 2002 at 15:52 UTC by The Swirling Brain

ElectronicsNews.Net has a new and recent (Nov 14th 2002) article about the rarely heard of Karcher's RoboVac 2000 vacuum cleaner. Maker Karcher makes various cleaning appliances from vacuums to gas station car washes. What appears to be interesting about this vacuum is that it monitors the stream of incoming dirt and will go back and forth over the same spot if it is found to be especially dirty. Also, this vacuum is smart enough to go back to a home base if it needs to recharge or if it needs to dump off a load of dirt. I couldn't find a price for this vacuum, nor could I find info on Karcher's home page and even links going back to Karcher's site have mysteriously disappeared so it still may be vaporware. More info can be found here, a better pic along with other robot vacs can be found on this page and on this page and here's an older article about robot vacs on Robots.net.

I think they gave up on it, posted 14 Nov 2002 at 21:00 UTC by earlwb » (Master)

At $2000 Euros it is too expensive, The ROOMBA came out recently at $200 US, and it does pretty much everything it does, plus it vaccums better too. $200 is a much better price, I think more people are likely to give it a go at $200, but $2000 is a little much.

Traditionally the robot vaccums have all had problems vaccuming, either they worked about as well as a FuzzBuster (which is worthless), or they were really big and huge, only suitable in a office building hallway. It looks like the Roomba may have finally overcome that suction problem.

Granted the Karcher unit does empty itself, linger over dirtier spots, and it know to recharge itself too, but still $2000 is way too much.