the Onda

Since this was CES (and therefore gadget) week, I figure I'll close it by talking about a gadget that really does feel useful enough to go mass-market.

If you are a fan of seeing how we perceived technology might affect our lives 50 years ago, you should head over to the Internet Archive and check out this advertorial film made in 1939 by Westinghouse called "The Middleton Family at the New York World's Fair" where the promise of "mechanical brains and robots" manifests itself primarily through the automation of domestic chores. It's kooky and campy (you have to love that long before NAFTA there were still people afraid of job decimation) and mostly wrong as it seems that very few domestic chores been automated... at least until iRobot's Roomba.

A friend who had a much earlier model a few years ago declared it "just shy of useful." Fortunately in the intervening years iRobot has improved on the design (3 subsequent generations) and shipped 1 million of them to cleaner homes throughout the world.

For those who have not heard of it, the Roomba is about 1.5 times the diameter of a frisbee and about 4 inches tall (for getting under counters). It comes with a base station and a timer which kicks it off vacuuming any flat contiguous surface. It is bag-less and doesn't have a huge receptacle (so it needs frequent cleaning), but surprisingly it works just as well as a human with an Electrolux. At the end of the cleaning cycle, it finds its own charging station and parks itself awaiting the next scheduled vacuum task.

It is truly a mechanical engineering marvel. It's durable, agile, and even when it chews up a toy it can't swallow, you can take it apart with little effort and not even a glance at the instruction manual.

The more remarkable thing though is how quickly you adapt to having a Roomba in your life. After making the mistake of running it during the middle of the day ( thus prompting the kids to play a game of Lord of the Flies with it), it now runs only at 1am doing its thing while the rest of us sleep. You go to bed at night with Cheerios on the kitchen floor and poof— the next day they are in the little receptacle at the machine's rump. It sounds simple but it feels amazing.

Having this kind of automation has naturally made me think of other things that could be automated. iRobot has launched other home robots: one that mops and one that cleans gutters, but I am more interested in the tasks I actually do: opening the mail, turning off all of the lights at night, emptying the dishwasher, sorting the recycling, etc. It would be great if the building blocks that have taken iRobot 10 years to build (and some nice military contracts building bomb-finding robots) were available for new small startups to experiment with doing these types of things.

Then maybe we'd end up more like the Middletons.

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