Meet “Robbie”, the newest member of our family.
Robbie is a Roomba household robot, a product of the iRobot corporation, and something I’ve wanted to own for a long time. It costs about the same as a decent vacuum cleaner, so I thought — what the hell.
I bought Robbie home on Friday and charged it (him?) overnight. Yesterday, I set Robbie loose in my carpeted bedroom, went out to do errands, came home and found the robot had shut itself off — and the floor clean. Wow.

When I emptied the robot’s bin (bagless of course), I found a ton of dirt, cat hair, all kinds of stuff that I didn’t realize was even on the carpet.
This morning I cleaned the robot’s brushes — it comes with a special tool to cut the hairs which have gotten entangled in the brushes — and set it to work in our living room, which has a wooden, not carpeted floor.
When Robbie begins to work, it makes a kind of trumpeting charge sound, which is very cute.
I didn’t realize that iRobot had further “humanized” it by having it call for help when there’s a problem.
Robbie got tangled in a cord — actually a very thin wire that served as an FM radio antenna — and stopped, and called out with fairly loud beeps.
I went into the living room when I heard this and didn’t see the robot anywhere.
I was tempted to call out — as one does for a cat or dog — but I’m not yet totally insane.
Then it beeped again and I realized that it was underneath a piece of furniture, a place which (to be completely honest) I’d never vacuumed before.
It had shut itself down. I removed the bit of wire, placed the robot back on the ground, and it resumed work.
As I write this, it’s cleaning the rest of the room.
For those of you who own, or have used, dishwashing machines or any other machine that does household chores, you may be asking yourself what’s the big deal. Machines have been saving us work and time in our homes for many years now.
The difference is that this a robot — it behaves with a kind of intelligence. As you watch it start in a room with a spiral search pattern, as it maps out the room, you realize that it’s not like one of those battery operated toy cars that simply goes around in circles.
Robbie pauses when it spots a particularly dirty location and stays there, going around in circles until its sensors tell it that he spot is clean.
The company says that Robbie will also know to stop at the top of a flight of stairs and not go tumbling over — I haven’t tested that yet, and with a jealous cat in the house, I’m not sure that I will.
After one day of use, I’m delighted to have Robbie here.
And I wait eagerly for iRobot’s next product — whatever it will be. (A robot cook would be nice, or perhaps just a robot that likes cleaning toilets? Or maybe one that nags teeenagers to clean their rooms or eat vegetables?)