Roomba and the role of future robots

Today, the house-cleaning Roomba seems almost ubiquitous, but in a recent essay, its inventor, Joe Jones, recalls his wrong prediction in the 1980s that "in three to five years, robots will be everywhere doing all sorts of jobs." For decades, he notes, "robots never managed to find their way out of the laboratory." Jones makes several good points about why some robotics companies fail: they fail to perform a valuable task, they fail to do the task today, or they fail to do the task for less. Robotic solutions need to be extremely simple. That's why the Roomba worked: the usefulness of an autonomous vacuum brought real robotics into many people's (and animals') homes with simple sensing, behavior-based programming, and mobility.