Robot vacuum cleaners
It’s surprising the Roomba hasn’t been created earlier since self mobile robots have been around as toys less than $50 since at least 1979 (see Big Trak). The Roomba is essentially a $200, low-power dust vacuum with a bump sensor, a light/collision sensor and a simple behavior to move it around flat surfaces. It works reasonably well as long as you keep the floor free of clutter such as cables and newspaper. My wife was initially skeptical, but then got excited as she saw it work. She then made the point of demoing it to her family. This degree of word-of-mouth advertising is hard to come by, so consider this a unique item. Here are two MPEG videos generated by a Sony U20 digital camera of the Roomba in action. (You could consider the poor image quality a review of the suitability of the Sony U20 as far as video is concerned.)
At least two other vendors - Hitachi and Electrolux have similar products as the Roomba. Eureka demoed one in 1999 to gauge interest, but apparently never brought it to market. There is some commentary about robot vacuums on robots.net. It seems most vendors were (and are still) targetting the over $1000 price point while Roomba is about $200. It’s available at Target and Bed Bath and Beyond. As an indicator of its popularity, eBay auctions are closing for about $150 as of 6/3/2003.
The Robot vacuum cleaners by Daily Movement, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.