Earlier this year, Chris’s parents got a robot vaccum/mop to relieve them of maintaining their large house. They decided to name the robot vacuum Modi, after Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India. Opinions about the Indian prime minister are usually quite polarizing. So Chris’s parents say they named the robot this because they “want to put Modi to work!” They took Modi out today so that Kaia could see him in action cleaning their house. “Modi has a mind of its own,” Chris’s mom always likes to say. And when I watched it in action, I finally understood what she meant. Modi creates a map of each room it enters, and it shows what it goes over and cleans and what it has yet to clean. It follows no one straight or understandable path, but when it looks like it’s missed a spot, it does eventually go back to it…. on its own time, and with its own method. The robot vacuum connects to an app on your phone, so you can trace its history of cleaning.The vacuum function seems useful, but I actually found the mop function even more handy. Mopping is annoying and painful even if you have all the furniture removed, so to have a machine do this for you would be a huge benefit. Not only would it relieve you of the strenuous effort, but it would also give you back a lot of time. Unfortunately, his parents have not used the mop function, so we have no data points on how good it would actually do in this department.

I loved watching Kaia interact with Modi. She kept following Modi, going behind and in front of it. She loved yelling, “Mo-DEE!” over and over and over again. She got worried when it got close to her scooter, and she yelled, “Don’t crash my scooter!” She talked to it as though it could actually hear her.

As much as his parents ran Modi for Kaia’s entertainment, I actually liked seeing it in action. The last time I watched a robot vacuum in action was over ten years ago, when my cousin got my aunt a very early robot vacuum. I found it really underwhelming: it missed spots, and it was agonizingly slow and inefficient… not to mention it cost way more than it should have given what a poor job it did. I guess Modi is an example of technology that has evolved. The first iterations may be crappy, but it can only improve over time.