Over the last 16 years, we’ve seen robotic vacuum cleaners improve drastically. The robotic vacuum cleaners that we use today are a far cry from those early, rather crude machines. The big challenge has always been to get the most effective use of the battery. This has seen major developments in the bot’s ability to navigate. The better a robotic vacuum cleaner is able to navigate around the room, the more efficient it will be – cleaning a greater area in a shorter time. Being able to accomplish more in less time, means that it will cover a greater area on a single charge. It’s not going to continuously repeat the same pattern, cleaning the same area for no reason.
When Dyson released their 360-degree Eye robot vacuum cleaner in 2014, the industry was shaken and many other manufacturers had to wake up and smell the coffee. Things were moving fast, as modern technology tends to. Apart from the bot’s ability to see the world around it and make better decisions based on this, their new robotic vacuum cleaner was able to send and receive information remotely. By using an App that works on either Android or iPhone (IOS) technology, the new robotic vacuum cleaner from Dyson was able to interact with the user like no other.
Wireless home communication like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth has taken home automation to a completely new level. Android and IOS devices (smartphones and tablets) allow for a much higher level of intelligent communication between us and our automated homes. As robotic vacuum cleaners are probably one of the most useful and popular of all automated home devices, the introduction of Android and IOS apps for these bots has been the most influential and the technology is growing fast. By now, most of the major robot vacuum cleaner manufacturers have apps for Android and IOS on their top models.
What are the advantages of using an Android or IOS app with your robotic vacuum cleaner?
The first (and probably most important) advantage to the smart technology used in devices like smartphones and tablets, is that these Apps can be updated regularly and made available for download instantly. Technology moves faster than many of us can keep up with. If you’re going to spend good money on a high-end robotic vacuum cleaner, you want it to be with you for quite a while. You’re not going to spend that kind of money every year because there’s a more intelligent robotic vacuum cleaner that’s come along. Now you can update your app and this gives you the new enhanced features as they come along.
Initially, the Android apps for robot vacuum cleaners were fairly basic. The main advantage is that you could schedule cleaning when you weren’t at home. This means that if for example, you found out at the last minute that your mother in law was dropping by unexpectedly, you could get onto the phone and tell your robotic vacuum cleaner to get working – Pronto!
However, the internet of things has caused the development of robotic vacuum cleaners to grow faster than anyone could imagine. The internet of things is a wide interconnected internet system that monitors all our internet based exchanges. This allows manufacturers to assess the needs of the end user in a way that was never possible before. The end result is that Android connectivity and robot vacuum cleaners have become much more useful in our daily lives and this is growing all the time.
Android apps for robotic vacuum cleaners now give us critical information. The app will tell you when the dust cup is nearly full – there’s no need to check it. Apps will track every movement that the robot vacuum cleaner makes, helping us determine their efficiency. We’re even able to program customized cleaning cycles if we wish to. The app will tell you when your robotic vacuum cleaner gets stuck and can also relay any fault message that the bot’s internal computer detects.
Another big advantage of robot vacuum cleaner apps and the internet of things is that all this information is also relayed to the manufacturer and their service centers. This allows them to diagnose faults quicker and receive valuable information. If they find a common fault being reported by many apps from around the world, they work at rectifying this. What’s even more remarkable is that they can often rectify these problems by simply updating the app. So if your robot vacuum cleaner is showing a recurring problem, like always getting stuck at a certain point in its cleaning cycle, there’s a good chance that this problem will be resolved the next time you update your robot vacuum cleaner app.
The growth in app technology grows so fast, that by the time you read this article, there will be many new features available by means of app updates that make robotic vacuum cleaners even more efficient and user-friendly.