Roomba vs Black Patterns in Rug...

We bought our Roomba not long before we bought our house. We used it to do a lot of vacuuming in the townhouse and it made the move-out clean easy enough that it was worth it just for that.

Well, when we moved in to the new house, we had hardwood floors put in. The poor Roomba got sent to the benches with nothing to clean.

Flash forward, we finally bought some area rugs for the living room and hallways. So, we decided to call the vacuum robot back into action. Unfortunately, when Annette tried to get the little guy to go, he refused at first. Then on another attempt he started acting a little paranoid and schizophrenic.

These rugs interesting mix of colors and patterns including a big black spiral. Well, it turns out that Roombas don't like dark rugs. It screws with their edge detection sensors that keep it from driving off a cliff. Since we don't have any cliffs, I decided to look into hacking it. Two seconds on Google, and I was reading about others who had the same problem and the solution.

To trick your Roomba into working on dark carpets and rugs, just apply clear packing tape over the four sensor wells in the front of the unit.

It really was just that easy. Our Roomba is one of the older, cheaper models but it seems like the current nicer models have the same issue as well. I wonder if the folks at iRobot are working on a more elegant solution for future models?