Dobby Slacking Off

I had my pet Roomba, Dobby, vacuum the living room. He did a self-confessed terrible job.

I had opened a box in front of the TV that had some expanded polystyrene inserts to separate pieces. I got a few expanded polystyrene spheroids on the carpet, so I sent Dobby out to vacuum them up.

Roombas send you a map of where they vacuumed, most of the time. This was what Dobby told me he’d vacuumed:

That is just unacceptable. Patchy, nonsensical coverage, similar to when your newly-minted middle schooler was assigned vacuuming, but mysteriously forgot how to do a chore they’ve done many times in the past. There’s a couple of holes in the vacuuming coverage. How does a Roomba even do that?

Dobby did a terrible job, so I sent him out a second time.

I’m not sure what’s up with the un-vacuumed zone by the final ‘E’ in CARPETED ZONE Could be Dobby’s dead reckoning had him find the sofa (grey rectangle) a little bit further north than he had believed previously.

The green, vacuumed area corresponds to the “carpeted area” “room” that I made up in the iRobot “App”. That only makes the patchy initial run more puzzling, as one of the green patches on Dobby’s first attempt map is on the wrong side of the grey rectangle (a sofa in the real world), outside of the carpeted area “room”.

Notes

I like Tolkien’s Dwarves, so east is up in the maps.