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Twelve years and 30 prototypes later, Roomba was born: a 5-lb. 10-oz., 13.5-in.-wide household robot that looks more like a horseshoe crab than a human being. Turn it on, and it springs to life with a surprising sense of alertness--almost as if it had a personality. Roomba's vision is limited, so it ranges around the room partly at random, covering open areas in widening spirals, then carefully following walls when it finds them, lightly bouncing off the occasional lamp or chair leg. It navigates using a set of simple rules called "heuristics"; iRobot originally developed Roomba's pathfinding program for a military robot designed to clear minefields. When Roomba determines--based on those heuristics, the size of the room and the number of obstacles it encounters on its travels--that it has covered every part of the room several times over, it stops, beeps cheerfully and shuts itself down.
As maids go, Roomba isn't perfect. Because of its shape, it leaves a little fluff in the corners where it can't quite reach. And if a couch is just the wrong height, Roomba can get wedged underneath. It helps to make the room Roomba-friendly by clearing up clutter and closing doors before you let it loose. ("It's a robot," Angle says, playing the protective daddy. "It's not Einstein.") But Roomba gets the job done--as long as the job isn't too big--and it sure beats doing it yourself. Angle hopes that one day Roomba will do for vacuuming what dishwashers did for dishwashing.
That day isn't here quite yet, but it's coming, and perhaps soon. Don't believe it? The big players are already moving in; companies like Hoover, Electrolux and Dyson are working on their own vacuum-cleaner robots, though they have yet to bring one to market in the U.S. Think of what personal computers were like in the late '70s. Nobody believed then that anybody would want a PC in their home, but then companies like Apple and Radio Shack made PCs affordable, and a killer app--word processing--made them indispensable. Now we can't imagine life without them.
Roomba will go on sale this week at roombavac.com and in retail stores, and on the Home Shopping Network shortly afterward. The first shot in the robot revolution has been fired, and the race to build the first successful PR (personal robot) is on. Is vacuuming the killer app robots have been waiting for? Is iRobot the first of the (gulp!) botcoms? If it is, one thing is clear: Roomba won't be the only one that cleans up.