A friend of mine bought a robotic vaccum cleaner as a gag. It's actually pretty fun to watch it semi randomly roaming around the room. It seems to have about 15 different direction change sequences, which allow it to eventually cover about 98% of a small area before the battery runs out.

Well, this friend has a pool table and one day when the table was looking a little shabby, we decided to try using the robotic vacuum cleaner on it. The thing did an absolutely awesome job. Fun to watch too, or did I already mention that? Well pretty soon we started seeing how good an 8 ball player the unit was. We set up a rack, and let the robot do its thing.

It eventually broke the rack and proceeded to clean up the table. While pushing balls in all over the place, it's tiny little brushes were scooping up all the ashes, dog hairs, and other detritus that accumulate on tables over time. Then it dawned on me, while this relatively cheap $150 cleaner wasn't too useful in a typical house, it was perfect for the tedious job of cleaning 10 tables at a pool hall.

While you may still need a brush to get under the edges, just sweep the mess out in the middle and let your little robot take care of it. It also seems to raise the nap of the felt, so you should start out with the vacuum mode on high.