Designer Dave Hakkens said he was inspired by a hamster ball when he came up with the idea for his Dustball, a giant robotic vacuum cleaner that rolls around the floor sucking up dirt.
"I created a little friend just rolling around and which you could push or kick in a direction to clean," Hakkens explains. "It has no trouble with cables or anything like that, it's strong, and when it rolls before your feet you just kick it out of the way."
When the Dustball gets its fill of dirt, it rolls back to its original destination and glows, letting you know it's time to empty the dust bucket inside.
We have to admit, it's a cool looking design, and maybe even functional for large open areas, but the shape could be problematic when it comes to vacuuming near walls, under tables, and near furniture.
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whathuhitwasntme
December 13, 2010 at 4:51pm
dust bunnies are the bain of all computers
if this would help eliminate them it would be a god send
somebody call Gordon, lets get this tested an reviewed!!!
violian
December 13, 2010 at 11:54am
This concept is going to fail miserably. The contact area between the floor and the vaccum is very miniscule. So it won't "suck" efficiently - especially being that it's going to employ a weak motor running on rechargeable batteries. Take a piece of paper, draw a circle, and then a tangent line to the circle. You'll see that the point of contact is almost infinitely small. So small, in fact, that you have to use calculus to prove that the tangential line is actually touching the sphere at all.
YoshiHNS
December 13, 2010 at 7:45am
So basically it's going to be this big ball of weight that will keep bouncing into you and everything else in the house while it does virtually nothing to clean. Sounds awesome.
Industrial Designer =/ engineer
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