The fiction, it is well known, anticipates the reality. A number of facts as computers or Big Brother made their appearance in literature and in movies before being an integral part of our lives. It's the same for vacuum cleaners; in cartoons, or in science fiction films, a robot does the dishes, the housework and also vacuums. Now, the vacuum cleaner robot is a new branch of the vast domain that is the industry of the vacuum cleaner, its accessories, and its equipment, and this branch is rapidly growing and a major technological shake-up is to come.

To replace the man by the machine is the oldest desire buried at the bottom of the human unconscious. Of the simple invention to use a single piece of wood as a lever up till the vacuum cleaner robot, there are thousand and thousand years of inventions. Since its introduction on the market in 2001, the vacuum cleaner robot does not seem to satisfy all the expectations based on him. Why? Maybe because, compared to our intelligent telephone, this device has only very few functions that can achieve a vacuum cleaner robot, roughly, it is to pick up the fine dust of your floors. Suck up dust, but not debris or waste of too big sizes. And for a quality device, you have to pay an important amount of money!

And nevertheless, the craze to vacuum cleaners robots is in full enlargement. Indeed, between 2012 and 2017, the sales for this type of device almost doubled, crossing as 45,000 vacuum cleaner robots in 2012 at 77,000 units sold in 2017!* It is the only kind of vacuum cleaner system which the sales do not stagnate; on the contrary, they are exponentially compared with the numbers of the sale of the vacuum cleaner's wagons, vertical, etc. And we can expect that the technology of these devices improves enormously because the big companies which make these vacuum cleaner robots consider equipping their devices with the spatial analysis technology. With this technology, the vacuum cleaner robot will make no more random round trips to clean floors but will be able to analyze the dimensions of rooms and distances between furniture and walls to sneak where space allows it, so maximizing the work of cleaning.

The truth is that the vacuum cleaner robot will occupy in our lives the same place as the prepared food and the deep-frozen meals because, in our modern world, we are lacking time. And never forgot that with sales increasing year after year, the prices of these devices will eventually lower down and we will be able to buy a very good robot vacuum cleaner at a low-priced. So, let us have a vacuum cleaner robot do the cleaning up our place as in movies and television shows of our childhood.

* In: Passport, Vacuum cleaner in Canada, p. 5