Volunteer group RVA Cleansweep, which has done many neighborhood cleanups in Oregon Hill and other neighborhoods throughout the City, is holding a special “experimental” cleanup/fundraising event this Friday morning.

From the FaceBook event page:

RVA Cleansweep is joining the Robotic Age! While we have enjoyed the help and contributions of many volunteers over the last year or so, we have decided to test a new kind of participatory event- we are inviting RVA area residents (who may be too lazy or perhaps physically unable to take part in our regular cleanups) to bring their vacuuming robots to the Oregon Hill neighborhood. We will be attempting to use the volunteered Roombas and similar robot vacuum models to clean several parking lots and asphalt covered areas. Because this is an experiment on our part, we are asking for a participation fee of $10 to help with event expenses.

Specifics:
Weather permitting, we will start with an orientation at 10:30 am and ‘Roomba roundup’ in a parking lot area on Idlewood Avenue (TBA, once you officially sign up your robot, we will send you an email with directions). After doing some test vacuuming there, we will have human volunteers ‘escort’ or guide robots down S. Laurel Street to Pleasants Park, where visiting associates from Canada’s Robot Shop will do a short workshop on cleaning and maintaining robot vacuums. We will then progress further down Laurel Street to the parking lot at Open High School (off China Street). The school parking lot should largely be empty for their spring break. After charging batteries, we will then move to the asphalt-covered basketball court at the Holly Street Playground. At each of these stops, we will be emptying the vacuums of their collected contents and cataloging the litter (we mostly expect small bits of glass, plastic, cigarette butts, etc.). If any of the robots still have juice, we may have some further robotic competitions that will include demonstrations from student robot teams from local high schools and VCU’s engineering school. Also, we expect to have some drones flying overhead to take video footage of this event.
Important: We want to make sure that owners recognize that RVA Cleansweep takes no responsibility for any actions, accidents, or malfeasance to or by its robotic or human volunteers. City insurance may not cover damage to robots or humans. Please do not bring your animal pets to this event. Do bring additional batteries, chargers (especially wireless solar ones), cleaning tools for robots, and other gear.

Roomba is a trademark of the iRobot company.

Looking forward to seeing how this event transpires. Certainly this is not the first time that the neighborhood has seen some interesting robotic experimentation.

Update: Sadly, due to weather concerns, this event has been officially postponed until a later date to be announced.

RVA Clean Sweep also has a regular cleanup scheduled for April 16th. It will focus on Randolph and the western side of Oregon Hill near Harrison. This is in conjunction with VCU’s Paint the Town Green event.