Word: iroboters
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...meet Roomba, a new housecleaning robot spawned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Lab and built by a Somerville, Mass., company called iRobot. Roomba's function is a humble one: it's designed to vacuum your living room while you're otherwise engaged. But Roomba also represents a technological watershed: it's the first robot ever built that is designed to live in your home, serve a useful purpose and be priced for the mass market--at $199, it costs about the same as a mid-range vacuum cleaner. Roomba isn't quite Rosey the Robot...
...practical level accomplished almost nothing. "You go into robotics thinking you're going to change the world," says Angle, who looks like a younger, nerdier Quaid brother. "You're not going to change the world with a million-dollar robot." In 1990 Angle, Greiner and Brooks founded iRobot hoping to build practical, affordable robots for everyday life...
...first they had to learn some hard lessons about those difficult creatures known as human beings. A robot is essentially a computer with a body, but iRobot wanted to market its robots as household appliances. And it turns out people have higher standards for appliances than they have for computers. Appliances have to be cheap, simple and reliable; nobody is going to buy a $2,000 vacuum cleaner that requires a Ph.D. in engineering and has to be rebooted twice a day. Leaving the ivory tower for the iRobot team was a culture shock. "We had to learn about plastics...
...INVENTOR iRobot --AVAILABILITY In 2002 --TO LEARN MORE Visit irobot.com...
Meanwhile at last week's Demo 2001, a prestigious computer- industry gathering in Phoenix, Ariz., the star of the show was iRobot, an eight-wheeled mechanical watchdog with a webcam nose that can patrol an empty house and send live video back to your website. "We're taking technology out of the virtual world and into the real world," says iRobot co-founder Helen Greiner...