This is version 1.1.1 of the review of version 1.0 of the cleaner, mentioning some features added in version 2.0 of the cleaner. Now, does everyone understand that ? User review: Electrolux Trilobite vacuum cleaner ------------------------------------------------ Cost: 999 pounds sterling Bought: 2004/4/14 (roughly when v2.0 was sneak-released, dammit) Introduction ------------ Before reading this user review you might find it useful to look at the official site for the cleaner: http://trilobite.electrolux.co.uk (.com, .de, etc. for appropriate language; requires Flash; plays soft sounds) The procedure ------------- Plug the charger in and site it so that its back is against a wall in the area you're cleaning. Take the cleaner, position it so that its rear is towards the charger and shove it backwards until it beeps that it is charging. Wait for it to charge (or don't) then press 'on', then 'yes'. The display then shows the current program and how much battery power is remaining. The cleaner turns 90 degrees right, then traces the perimeter of the area in an anti-clockwise direction. Once it has got back to the charger it decides how long it needs to clean that area and adds this information to the display. It then heads off in a random direction counting down the time remaining. From then on it bounces around the area to be cleaned. Mostly it turns at one obstacle, travels until it reaches an obstacle, then turns and sets off again. After a while it seems to change its behaviour and sometimes changes direction before it reaches an obstacle. I guess that as more of the area gets cleaned it has to change direction more frequently to find an uncleaned patch. Once the time is up it turns off the vacuum sucking and proceeds almost silently back to its charger where it plugs itself in, recharges, then turns itself off. It will also go back to its charger if it runs out of power while it's cleaning, then carry on when it has recharged. Very funny to watch. The cleaner has a number of detectors sprinkled over the 180 degrees at its front, set high and low and at various angles. It uses these to detect when its about to run into an obstacle and stops short. For almost all walls and simply-shaped obstacles in my cleaning areas the cleaner miraculously stopped without even touching them, maybe one centimetre (half an inch) away. In cases where these detectors fail the entire front 180 degrees of the cleaner comprise a shock-bar, causing the cleaner to stop if the front of the case is pressed. This came into use sometimes, notably with one rather strangely-shaped chair I have which has legs which emerge at strange angles. The cleaner moves at at least two different speeds, slowing down when it approaches a place where it remembers an obstacle. It's pretty satisfying to watch it slow down as it approaches a wall, stopping just short of actually touching it. While testing I tried to annoy the cleaner several times by moving to stand in front of it. It almost always stopped before hitting my leg. When it did hit my leg the impact was so gentle that I could imagine it running into a thin kitten's leg without doing much more than ruffle the fur. You don't need to have a charger in the room you're cleaning. If you start the Trilobite when it's not connected to a charger it begins by moving forward until it finds a wall, then continues as normal. One bad aspect of this feature is that the device has no charger to return to when it's finished or when the power runs out. So it stops wherever it happens to be and if it happens to be under a bed when the time's up then that's where it stops and you have to reach under and grab it out. The result ---------- A mostly clean carpet. Or floor. Whatever. The cleaner does its best never to touch walls and obstacles so you get a line of dust next to each wall. A little experimenting (okay, I sprinkled some flour around) showed that the line was between one and two centimetres wide. However the cleaner sucks so strongly that even some of the dust in this uncleaned area gets sucked away. The rooms I was vacuuming were well cleaned before I got the Trilobite so I didn't have any build-up of dust to deal with but I'd imagine that after a month or so of using the Trilobite to clean I'll have to go around the edges of all my carpets with a conventional vacuum cleaner to clean up the edges. The other problem is that the algorithm used by the cleaner doesn't cover every spot. When cleaning a dirty patch which I'd revealed by moving my couch the Trilobite clearly missed a triangular patch about the size of two footprints. I puzzled over this for a while, then, without moving any of the furniture delineating the area to be cleaned I started the Trilobite working again. This time it cleaned that patch. So there's obviously some randomness in the algorithm the cleaner uses. What the cleaner does very well is clean difficult areas. It copes well with doglegs and with narrow passages leading off of big areas. The cleaner is 38 cm (15") wide and happily ventured into a gap between two of my shelves set 42 cm apart. It's 13 cm (6") high and cleaned well under one of my shelves which is set at 15 cm high. The area-covering algorithm copes happily with curved walls and with strangely-shaped furniture either next to a wall or in the middle of the room: I would have no hesitation in using it in an egg-timer shaped room with weirdly-shaped modern furniture. I opened several doors to run three of my rooms into one-another and the cleaner successfully ran around all the walls mapping the area and cleaned each room. It's purely a pleasure to watch a Trilobite vacuuming under a bed, yards out of reach. I let it run over wires several times in testing expecting to have to rescue it. In each case it successfully piloted its way out of the mess, trying various combinations of moving forwards and backwards and turning a few degrees, sometimes for up to half a minute before finding a way out. Apart from when the cleaner is backing up to its recharger this was the only time I ever saw it move backwards -- presumably a dangerous operating since it has no detectors on the rear of the case. I could imagine a tangle of wires which would trap the cleaner entirely (there's an appropriate error code mentioned in the manual) but you'd almost have to set an intentional trap for it to make it move onto the wires to start with. The cleaner takes about eight minutes for my bathroom and about 25 minutes for my largest room. I experimented with opening all the internal doors in my flat and letting it clean the entire area in one go but although it ran around the now extremely complicated perimeter correctly it missed cleaning about half the kitchen and half of the small bedroom. By cleaning the two largest rooms separately I got satisfactory coverage. Sooner or later you're going to have to do some work ---------------------------------------------------- The good news: there's no dustbag to replace: you get a neat transparent plastic container instead, so you can see when it needs emptying. It's very easy to take out and closes with a really neat magnetic lid. I'd recommend getting some of those cheap disposable plastic gloves so you can brush out the accumulated dust and lint. The bad news: instead of having to buy dustbags you have to buy filters. You get five with the cleaner (six if you count the one which comes inside it) and then buy boxes of ten afterwards. You're meant to put a new filter in every time you empty the box. The filters aren't very expensive (about a pound each) but I can't see that happening every time. It's also possible for the front roller to get tangled up in thread or fluff so there's a procedure for cleaning that. The good news: it looks like the designers paid a lot of attention to making both operations are very fast and easy. You can see if the roller needs cleaning just by looking at the bottom of the cleaner so you don't waste time taking it out unnecessarily. All the parts are big enough to handle with stubby fingers, and there's no way to put them back in the wrong way around. This aspect of using devices can often ruin the user-experience and the designers should be proud to be associated with this aspect of the Trilobite. Other modes ----------- As well as normal mode described above, the Trilobite features two others. 'Quick vacuuming' omits the initial run around the perimeter described above and just tries to cover the floor for ten minutes. This means that more of the area gets cleaned in the time, but the cleaner has no clear idea of the shape of the area its meant to cover. It builds an impression of the shape as it goes along, based on where it finds walls, but it can miss alcoves and doorways entirely. This mode is good for small rectangular rooms but not for large or strangely-shaped areas. The last mode is 'spot-vacuuming'. You set the cleaner going, and it cleans a one square metre area around the start-point covering every part exactly once in a maze-like pattern. This is meant for when you're cleaning up a spill or a patch of mud or something like that. I've not used this mode yet and can't tell you how well it works. As well as using other modes you can change the timing for the normal and quick modes from the defaults. So you can set the cleaner going for 20 minutes of random bouncing off of walls (in 'quick vacuuming') or for a really thorough one-hour coverage of a floor ('normal vacuuming'). Batteries and charging ---------------------- The Trilobite has two bare metal patches on its rear, and the charger has two terminals in corresponding locations on its front. None of these are powered unless the cleaner is actually charging and when charging (when it's quite hard to get anything between the cleaner and charger) power is passed to the cleaner at 28 volts DC. Although I wouldn't leave a charger unattended in a child's room, I'd be quite happy to leave one in a public area a child was playing in, as long as it was away from liquids. The cleaner has two batteries in and switches between them automatically both charging and discharging. The switching is a little disconcerting when it's vacuuming: it stops dead for a few seconds and just as you start to think about investigating what went wrong it springs back to life. My cleaner was in a sealed box so I'll assume that the batteries hadn't been used before. I let it charge up while I as at work before the first use in an effort to avoid the memory-effect associated with Nickel-Metal hydride batteries. After a few uses I timed it charging and discharging. I got about 1 hour 15 minutes of use out of a full 1 hour 30 minute charge. Obviously, as with all other chargeable batteries, their capacity is going to shrink as time goes on. If I happen to remember, I'll update this review when I notice the times going down. The cleaner does this cute little dance when trying to get the charging contacts to meet, backing up, then moving a little forwards and turning a few degrees before backing up again. Mine seems to try this about four times before getting the patches perfectly aligned, then it sighs to a stop with a satisfied mutter, switching the display to show 'Recharging' and a moving battery level meter like those used on mobile phones. Once, in my efforts to further annoy -- sorry, test -- the cleaner I turned off the power to the recharger when the cleaner was returning to be recharged. After trying various angles to make the contacts meet the cleaner moved away from the wall, looped back to a point on the wall before it had reached the cleaner and started the whole approach again. When it still failed after more attempts at different angles it stopped, played a little tune, and showed a useful error message on the display. Annoyances ---------- Some of these are inevitable, but I've mentioned them anyway. Others are curious omissions on the part of the manufacturer which wouldn't have cost much more to incorporate into the design. When it's recharging, you don't know how much longer it's going to take and it doesn't play a tune to tell you when it's fully recharged. This probably doesn't matter in normal use but I can imagine every reviewer and keen new user waiting for the cleaner to recharge. It be quite difficult to put the device in the right position to get it to charge. I'm not quite sure what I'm doing wrong, if anything, but I seem to have to shove the front of the thing a couple of times to get it to turn off (or am I turning it on ?) before it'll recharge. If the cleaner finds its charger itself it seems to work fine, so I'm being outsmarted by a machine ! Although several aspects of the behaviour of the cleaner suggest that it's keeping an internal model of what parts of the surface haven't been cleaned yet, it can still miss spots. I'm puzzled as to why. But it doesn't seem to miss the same spots every time you clean so if you clean regularly then there's no opportunity for dirt to build up over a long time. And you can use 'spot-vacuuming' if you notice a bad patch yourself. The kit supplied with the cleaner includes two long magnetic strips you can use to divide off lines you don't want the cleaner to pass. The manual talks about these mainly in connection with cleaning an area at the top of a staircase, to stop the cleaner from falling downstairs. I had two problems with them. The first was that I uncurled one and couldn't get it to work. The second problem was that the diagrams in the book are pretty clear that you're meant to attach one strip to the top of the edge of the step. I took one look at the diagram and wondered how long it would be before someone tripped on the strip and fell downstairs. Instead of using the supplied strips I found it quite satisfactory to divide off the desired area using some handy boxes. Since the cleaner stops before it actually touches them they don't have to have anything heavy in them, they just have to be there. Finally, a funny one: it attracts dust ! The body of the cleaner is made of plastic and it can build up a static charge as it brushes against a carpet. So once the trilobite has finished cleaning you go to pick it up and find your hands a little dusty. I don't see a way to avoid it but I thought I'd mention that you still can't vacuum without getting your hands dirty. The meta-results ---------------- Once I learned to trust the cleaner and did other things rather that watch it work, time was saved. The spotless condition of the carpets inspired me to do some dusting which otherwise wouldn't have got done. Normally I dust carefully since I don't want the dust to fall on the carpet making even more work for me but with this cleaner this wasn't a problem so I got the dusting done faster too. Just remember to dust first and vacuum later ! Also, I have the urge to show this thing off to my friends who are geeks or have big houses, or both. Summary ------- Pros: works as advertised huge amount of time and effort saved cleans under beds and in small gaps automatic shut-off, so can leave cleaner running when you go out doesn't use dustbags encourages cleaning when you wouldn't normally bother entertaining for geeks, kids, and possibly your pet Cons: expensive filter should be changed every time you empty the container doesn't empty its dust container (I WANT MY FLYING CAR !) about as loud as a normal vacuum cleaner siting of recharger can be a little tricky doesn't clean right to the edge of the carpet can miss spots (but can get those spots if you clean a second time) still need conventional vacuum cleaner/dustbuster/dustpan & brush to clean high places and edges of areas Cleaning score: 7/10 (bad edges, missed spots) Effort-saving score: 9/10 (lost 1 for emptying dust container) Geek entertainment value: 7/10 (more if you have lots of geek friends) Highly recommended for people with restricted mobility who can nevertheless reach down and empty the thing. Other people should take all the above into account and make their own decision. Trilobite Version 2.0 --------------------- The following information was taken from Electrolux's publicity about the Trilobite version 2.0. I had a devil of a time trying to find out about this even though it has officially been launched, but here's the info: -------- begin quote # Trilobite 2.0 is the latest version of the automatic vacuum cleaner. # Electrolux has made over 200 modifications to its product, though some # are more visible than others. # # Five Major Changes # # * Programmable. The Trilobite 2.0 can be programmed, not unlike a VCR. # You can set the vacuum cleaner to do the cleaning at, say, 10 am # every day while you are at work, go out for a walk or do anything # else you like. # # * Stair sensor. The Trilobite is equipped with an active infra-red # sensor, which detects approaching changes in floor level, including # stairs. The vacuum cleaner then changes direction and continues # cleaning. Magnetic strips are only needed if you wish to block off # certain rooms, and can be hidden under rugs of a maximum thickness # of 15 mm. # # * Smarter cleaning. The Trilobite 2.0 comes with an improved # navigation algorithm, which involves detecting the amount of # obstacles (e.g. furniture) present in a room and adjusting the # cleaning time to it. # # * Improved display. The display now indicates how long the vacuum # cleaner can keep operating before recharging and, during # recharging, how much longer it will take to be fully charged. # # * [new colour: it's a silvery green rather than red] -------- end quote Refs ---- Official: http://trilobite.electrolux.co.uk (.com, .de, etc. for appropriate language; requires Flash; plays soft sounds) Good review with lots of description and pictures: http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/articles.hwz?aid=654&page=1 Page from the original designers: http://www.avantel.se/Trilobitee_f.htm