There's nothing as common, as repetitious, or as universal as housework, whether you live in a tidy cottage in Boston or a ten-room mansion in Beverly Hills. Of course, if you're wealthy enough you can hire someone to do the housework for you -- something for us all to aspire to -- but that's simply beyond the means of most Americans.

That doesn't mean that you can't make housework easier. These days, technology has lightened the load considerably. You don't have to take your carpets outside once a month and beat the dirt out of them with a great big wire whisk; now you can push around a vacuum cleaner once a day. Washing machines made washboards useless for anything other than Zydeco and Cajun music. And you needn't tote ice to the icebox anymore either, unless you really want to.

But washing machines, vacuum cleaners, microwaves, dishwashers, and all the other nifty labor saving devices we use today are so Twentieth Century. Where are all the robots we've been promised for the last fifty years? Where's that glittery future we've been looking forward to?

As it turns out, it's already here.

Newfangled stuff that sucks

From swiffer mops to ergonomic brooms, the household products industry is doing its best to make life easier for those of us who have to do housework. But the real revolution in housework is just now dawning -- and it's represented by a fat little saucer that trundles around on the floor, cleaning as it goes. In 2002, the commercial robotics company iRobot introduced Roomba, the first robotic vacuum cleaner. Roomba's hardly what most people expected household robots to be like, but it does its job just fine, with a minimum of human intervention. It can handle any floor from pile carpet to linoleum, can follow a room's contours efficiently, avoids obstacles, gets under furniture easily, and plugs itself back in after it's done. So far, it's sold 1.5 million units. Naturally, there's now a plethora of me-too robovac models slurping up dirt in homes all over America, made by companies ranging from Electrolux to Sharper Image.

If you're interesting in reducing your housework load, a good place to start is by purchasing your own robovac. They're fun, easy to use, and give you more time to do your own thing. A base model will cost you around $150, so they're no more expensive than a good floor vacuum. But the real significance of these robotic vacuums is this: they're the leading edge of the home robot revolution, a breakthrough that has been both expected and hoped-for for decades. Soon, your robovac might be the least among the items helping you with your housework, inside the house and out.

What's on the horizon?

In the future, you can expect the role and functionality of existing robovacs to expand. Foreseeable improvements include increased range and capacity, and wouldn't it be great if your robovac could empty out its own debris bin? That shouldn't be much harder to program than having the robot plug itself into the wall. And there's other gadgetry on its way. Within months you'll be able to purchase a device to scrub floors for you. Scooba, close kin to Roomba, can handle a large kitchen on one charge. It'll be the first mopping robot, but you can be sure others will soon follow.

What else can you expect in years to come? Most household tasks are already mechanized to some extent, but there are a few chores that could use some robotic help. Cleaning windows, for example, seems a task ideal for mechanization, and if robots can clean the floor, why can't they clean toilets? Of course, whatever we can imagine will probably be less than the eventual reality; after all, no one but iRobot foresaw the robotic vacuum cleaner as it exists today. One day household robots will be both common and cheap, and there's no telling what tasks they'll be taking off out hands. And the best part is, they'll probably be cheaper to maintain than teenagers!

Published with permission (FCDMInc)

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