Robot Vacuum Cleaner to Be Sold in $8,500 Price Range

A robot vacuum cleaner that can tidy up on its own and maneuver around tables and chairs is expected to go on sale within the next three months.

Cybervac, which looks like a square version of the R2D2 robot in the “Star Wars” movies, with a nozzle attached, took five years and $1.7 million to develop.

“Cybervac simply has an on-off switch. You take it out of the crate, turn it on. It will analyze its environment and it will determine the most effective way to vacuum clean,” said its 26-year-old Canadian inventor, Vivek Burhanpurkar.

The first model will be for use in offices, schools and retail stores, because its $8,500 price makes it prohibitively expensive for home use, said Burhanpurkar.

But the inventor said the price could eventually drop as low as $1,700.

Funding for the robot vacuum cleaner has come from the National Research Council of Canada and Europe’s largest contract-cleaning concern, Amsterdam-based Hoden BV.

Burhanpurkar’s company, Cyberworks, has a tentative order for 300 Cybervacs from Hoden and orders from other European and North American businesses.

Cees Ravesteyn, a spokesman for Hoden, said that Cybervac has the potential to halve the time spent vacuuming by its 40,000 employees.

“We have calculated it would represent a 1% savings overall if we bought 300 vacuum cleaners,” Ravesteyn said. “With revenues of 750 million Dutch guilders ($386 million)--big savings.”

But Ravesteyn contends that employees would not be replaced by robots.

“At this point we prefer to make it an extra rather than replace people with it,” he said. “It allows us to clean more effectively.”