In 2002 a Massachusetts company called iRobot launched the Roomba - a flat, round vacuum cleaner that drives itself around your house. It was the first robot most ordinary people ever had in their home. Behind it was a serious robotics company. iRobot had been founded in 1990 by three robotics researchers from MIT, and one of their main businesses was building robots for the U.S. military.
The same engineers who designed bomb-disposal robots for the army used a lot of the same ideas in the Roomba. It has bump sensors, cliff sensors so it doesn’t fall down stairs and a clever spinning brush that pulls dirt toward a central vacuum.
What’s funny is the original Roomba had no map of your house. It just drove around at random - bouncing off walls and changing direction - and eventually covered the whole floor. Newer Roombas use cameras and lasers to make real maps. But the original was so simple it almost felt like a bug crawling around.
