The Mysterious Origins of Roomba

To understand Roomba and where it's coming from, you have to go way back to 1920, when Czech writer Karl Capek published an influential play called R.U.R., or Rossom's Universal Robots. The play provided the first modern use of the word "robot," in terms of a mechanical entity that did work that was too dangerous, repetitive, or boring for humans. The word was actually coined by Capek's brother Josef, also a writer, and was based on the Czech word for drudgery, "robota."

That's not so say that no devices classifiable as robots had ever existed previously; functioning automatons had been built occasionally since the days of the ancient Greeks. Mostly steam-powered and shaped like human beings, they could perform amazing tasks like nodding their heads or waving their arms. It wasn't until after Kapek's play was produced, however, that the concept of complex machines that could do real work was seriously considered. Science fiction writers elaborated on the concept for decades thereafter, culminating in Isaac Asimov's invention of the term "robotics," which is now widely used in the field. Many of Asimov's robot stories were collected in an influential book called "I, Robot."

The first commercial robots (aside from children's toys) came online in the early 1960s, when they were used on auto assembly lines for repetitive tasks like welding and handling red-hot metal. Since then, advances in robotics have been rather slow, as roboticists and their allies have come to realize just how difficult it is to mimic in a machine natural processes like movement, balance, image processing, and pattern recognition.

This brings us to 1990, when roboticists from MIT founded a new company called iRobot (obviously influenced by Asimov!) that was dedicated to creating robots to tackle "dull, dirty and dangerous missions, from cleaning floors to disarming explosives." Their first robot, Genghis, looked a lot like a robotic insect, with six legs and a wide, flat body. It was "born" in 1990, soon after the company was founded, and was created to explore other worlds (it now lives in the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum). Genghis was followed in 1996 by Ariel, a mechanical crab that detected and eliminated mines in ocean surf zones. Ariel begat Urbie, the first robot built under the Urban Robot program funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) -- the same organization that birthed the Internet. Urbie, in turn, begat the PackBot line of tactical robots, a line of small, light machines that have seen extensive use in the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

November 2008: Latest updates are in green.

On to part three:

• From Mine Sweeping to Carpet Sweeping
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