Can you outsource vacuum cleaning to Russia?

April 1, 2004

Data entry, software development, customer support, call centers, tax preparation – any type of work that can be done remotely has been outsourced to India, China or Russia. What is next?

Vacuum cleaning the floors of America seems to be an unlikely candidate. You need to be physically present to operate the vacuum cleaner. American robotics manufacturer iRobot, Inc. and the Russian space agency beg to differ. A fleet of iRobot’s vastly popular Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners will be remotely operated out of semi-abandoned space flight control center in Plesetsk, a remote town in the Russian frigid far North, beyond the Polar circle.

While iRobot’s Roomba Floorvacs (http://www.roombavac.com/products/default.asp ) can operate completely autonomously, sometimes additional remote control could be beneficial, especially when sweeping the floors of factories, office spaces divided by cubicles, warehouses and other businesses. To address this market, iRobot announced a new model of Roomba, complete with the remote control and inexpensive wireless camera.

To capitalize on the growing a ubiquity of WiFi wireless LANs, iRobot cleverly choose WiFi as a communication medium, thus allowing connecting the robo vacs to the enterprise LANs and on to the Internet. As a result, the floor sweepers can be controlled from any in the world.

In a joint venture with the Russian space agency, a remote control center will be set in Plesetsk (plesetsk.org) and staffed by local cadres. The choice of Plesetsk is not accidental. One reason is that the salaries in Plesetsk are much lower than in Moscow: $200 a month is viewed as a rather generous pay. The main reason however is the available infrastructure and abundance of highly qualified workers trained to remotely operate Russian military and civilian satellites and even the Lunokhod (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_1), the Russian Moon rover. Being similar to American Opportunity and Spirit Mars rover, the Lunokhods roamed the surface of the Moon in early ‘70s.

“After finding the path between the huge boulders 300,000 mi away, in 1/6 gravity, navigating the floors of Boeing assembly plant in Seattle will be like walk in the park,”- says Fedor Krivoruchko, 62, who had to sell vodka and sausage as a street vendor after he was laid off from the space center as Russian space program was drastically downsized following the collapse of the Soviet Union.