![]() The Kuri robot from Mayfield Electronics, showcased at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show, can indeed roll around your home (no bendy arms, however). Just for fun try saying “Open the pod bay door, Alexa,” and see what happens.Īs for more traditional-looking domestic robots, they are arriving. These “smart speakers”-in effect, wireless voice-activated computers-are certainly butlers of a sort, but these devices are not so much Rosie or Robby-more in the tradition of the HAL 9000 (which is never actually referred to as a robot in the Stanley Kubrick film). The most popular new household helpers are devices like Amazon Alexa and Google Home. Has Great King Roomba given rise to a new generation of domestic automatons? Only if you expand that old sci-fi definition. But 16 years after the Roomba first scoured the Earth, the most surprising aspect of the domestic robot realm may be how little it has progressed. We were to be served by humanoid helpers like the Jetsons’ mechanized maid Rosie or Luke Skywalker’s high-strung pal C-3PO. No science fiction visionary ever predicted that the future of robotics would be pioneered by a voracious dirt-munching ladybug. “First you get the spilled Cheerios,” says Roomba, “then you get the power.” As Vladimir Lenin once said, “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” ![]() Thanks to the Home Shopping Network, Roomba was soon creeping over floors in millions of households, a Trojan bot invited through the gates. The rise of the machines would have to wait-this one was not going to rise above your ankles. (The prototype is now housed in the Smithsonian.) But the company’s real commercial breakthrough would arrive in 2002-the Roomba home vacuum. That same year our robotic future began to take shape when a company called iRobot, launched the previous year by a group of MIT students, unveiled Genghis, a six-legged robot designed for extraterrestrial exploration. ![]() In 1991 James Cameron’s cautionary blockbuster Terminator II: Judgment Day was packing theatres. Some of the fields where robots are getting a metallic foot in the door: Domestic Help This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.
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