Having a robot slave can be expensive. The iRobot Roomba 980 Vacuum Cleaning Robot is a hefty $1499, but what price do you put on not having to do the housework?

Surprisingly, the Roomba 980 is incredibly easy to set up and use. Once it's charged, to make it start just press the big green button marked CLEAN. Equally surprising is that I gave it a few words of encouragement on its first cleaning job. Forget fake news, treating robots as people and developing emotional bonds with them is a scary insight into a new fake reality.

But back to cleaning. On my wooden floors, tiles, and rugs the machine did a great job picking up dust and dirt, boosting up the suction when it found a rug. It also has a spiral rotating brush that gets the grit out from corners and edges.

Slowly and steadily, it impressively navigates corners, table legs, tiny steps, and knows its way around a chair. It has a bumper sensor and a camera, and systematically covers areas in straight lines, but it does miss bits.

In a great feature, when it's running out of juice, the robot automatically makes its way back to the charging dock, recharges, and then continues vacuuming.

Emptying the dustbin is simple, easier than emptying my non-robot one. The only drawback is that the Roomba 980 is noisy, but then again so is my traditional machine.

There's the option of using the iRobot app, where you can start and stop the bot remotely, see how it's going from your device, or set up cleaning schedules. You can even name it. But I look forward to the day when robots follow me around and obey my voice commands.