How Marvin the robo-vac became a (weird) member of the family

“I can’t do it,” my daughter declared, watching nervously as our brand-new robot vacuum cleaner poked around her feet. “I can’t anthropomorphise Marvin.”

Coming from her, this was a big statement. Hannah’s powers of humanising the non-human are profound. As a little girl, she made a pet of a snail she found in the backyard, named him/her Twig, and planned out a long and happy life together. (Soon after, Twig met their fate when Hannah dropped them and cracked their shell. As their life force leaked gruesomely out of their back, she made tearful attempts to staunch the wound, and asked me to call an ambulance. Sixteen years later she still struggles to talk about it.)

Marvin the robot vacuum cleaner (left) heads back to base as Soda the cat keeps a respectful distance.Credit: Michael Bachelard

I have to agree, though, it’s hard to like Marvin. He’s a squarish block of black plastic and fancy lights, who to my eye gives off an air of lurking hunchbackishness.

He also talks to himself. “Return to wash the mopping pads,” he’ll announce in a grating voice, then hustle back to his base station. I’m never sure if it’s a reminder to self or an explanation for the rest of us that, really, he’s still hard at work, not slacking off at home.

I named Marvin after the paranoid android in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The original Marvin had a brain the size of a planet, but his superintelligence only served to plunge him into deep and theatrical depression due to the mundanity of the tasks he was assigned.

This is not a risk, I suspect, that my Marvin confronts. His tasks are likewise mundane, but his brainpower seems stretched by even the basics. If this is artificial intelligence at work, I’m feeling fairly relaxed about the threat.

Marvin the paranoid android from the 2005 movie The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Marvin was bought (at enormous expense) after we recently renovated our apartment and acquired a smooth, concrete floor amenable to a robo-vac’s ministrations, and shiny enough to need regular cleaning. We also have carpet in the bedrooms, so we went straight to the top of the range. Marvin mops, he vacuums, he expels his own waste. All I have to do is tend to his base station.

Out of the box, Marvin’s first task was to map the area – two bedrooms, a bathroom, loo, laundry, and open-plan living. The map seemed reasonable – it looked just like our place, and I was delighted. Except the laundry was missing. No problem, I thought, I’ll get into the software and put the room in there. With some fiddling, I made it so.

Still Marvin refuses to visit. Once I physically put him into the room. “This is the laundry, Marvin,” I said. “Please clean it.” He spun on his wheels and trundled out.

Marvin’s map. Note the fictional rooms on the left, and the big balcony at the top: Marvin’s realm of dreams.Credit: Michael Bachelard

The laundry (he’s named it Study 1) may be dead to Marvin, but over time he has brought to life a number of other rooms on his little internal map. Off to the side of the toilet a room has appeared that he calls “Balcony”. There’s nothing there, I guarantee. I’ve checked. My daughter’s room has acquired a fictitious extension too, marked Room 2. Its irregular edges suggest Marvin is guessing at its dimensions, which is fair enough because IT DOESN’T EXIST.

A genuine space that Marvin can glimpse, and has mapped through the sliding glass doors, is our actual balcony. He’s imputed vast, fresh fields to mop there, divided it neatly into rooms called Room, Room 1 and, inexplicably, Dining Room. There’s a Room 3 somewhere in the ether too. I had to draw a firm line on his virtual map to stop Marvin’s frenzied attempts to get out there, during which he would repeatedly bang his little bumper bar against the glass.

Then there are the things he doesn’t see – and will apparently never learn. The legs of our barstools run along the ground, below Marvin’s gaze but high enough for him to get stuck on. After marooning himself there multiple times and requiring assistance, we now put them on the (actual) balcony at cleaning time, in the realm of Marvin’s dreams.

He found his way into my daughter’s wardrobe once, wrapped her dressing gown cord around his roller and virtually hanged himself while plaintively calling for help. That time I had to come home from work to untangle him.

A couple of weeks ago, I checked on him because he was making a funny noise, to realise he’d disembowelled himself in the middle of his task. Cat hair had plugged him up to such an extent that his roller had popped out. He was battling gamely on with his work without any of the requisite cleaning equipment on board.

“Is he worth it, do you think?” my wife inquired recently. She finds him irritating and inexplicable, and suspects I only bought him to shirk my duty as duster and vacuumer (she might be partially right there).

“What’s he doing?” she asked last week as Marvin burst out of his home station, bumped immediately into the staircase then turned circles for the next few minutes wondering where he was.

The honest answer is, I have no idea. Marvin, you’re a mystery to me too. But, as gormless as you are, as flawed, puzzling and lacking in intellectual and emotional depth, I’m coming to think you’re quite cute. Also, without you, we’d be mopping every week.

Excuse me now; a little someone needs his dirty mop bucket emptied.

Michael Bachelard is a senior writer and former deputy editor and investigations editor of The Age.

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