New gadgets can clean without our help

Here are four intriguing household appliances now on the market.

AI Lawn Assistant Lawn Nibbler, developed at the University of Florida's Machine Intelligence Laboratory, is a robot lawn mower. A radio wire is buried at the perimeter of your grassy area, so it never goes into the neighbor's garden. Both you and your pets may be unsettled by the prospect of letting loose a robot, but they really work. A navigational bacon system uses sonar to guide it around turtles, children, and birdbaths. Homebotics' Robomower is another version of Artificial Intelligence yard maintenance, with a model selling for $600 which promises to eliminate air and noise pollution as well as trim your lawn. You can see a video clip of the silent (it runs on electric power) clipper at work on a Night Mow or trimming the edges of your estate. A spiffy flag holder gives this once-mundane chore an unexpected patriotic tinge (the Robomower also mulches leaves). Available at http://homebotics.com.

Steam Clean Everything Steambuggy is a versatile home steam cleaner. Moderately priced at $100, it cleans just about anything using only hot water. You can sanitize kitchen countertops, deodorize garbage cans, and steam-clean carpeting. The lightweight canister can be wheeled outside to use on backyard funriture and the barbecue grill, to the garage to clean wheels, or into the bedroom closet to remove wrinkles in your clothes.

Cyclone Force Vacuum: At the high end of the spectrum is the Dyson vacuum cleaner. The Dyson has an internal engine to match its rocket-ship looks: It is driven by centrifugal force, air spinning at very high speeds in a plastic cone. The result is cyclone-force suction power that does not diminish as the bag fills with dirt, since there is no bag. It took founder and inventor James Dyson 15 years of experimenting and 5,000 failed prototypes to arrive at this exalted level of suction. Manufacturers all rejected his bagless technology, so he entered the market himself in 1993. Now once-tiny Dyson sells almost half the vacuum cleaners in England (his next challenge: washing machines). Dyson vacuums are available on the web from Conran's, models ranging from $300-$400.

Robot for the Floors: Roomba is a first cousin to Robomower, the robot lawn mower. The Roomba Intelligent Floor Vac looks like the offspring of a bathroom scale and a compact disc player, flat and round and close to the ground. Made by MIT grads at iRobot Corp, Roomba cleans wood floors or carpet or tile (it has different gizmos to clean different surfaces) more or less on its own. You charge the battery, press a button for approximate size of the room it is cleaning, and turn it on. It moves in small circles at first, getting used to the terrain, then in larger spirals.

When it bumps into something, Roomba spins to circumvent the obstruction, cleaning all the while. Barring close encounters with your dog and any stray power cords, Roomba patrols its assigned sector and beeps to tell you it is finished. A drop-off detector (missing in most toddlers) tells it to avoid stairs. It's $200 at Hammacher Schlemmer.

Tom Durwood can be contacted at tbird3080@aol.com.

10/25/02