Roomba

The Roomba went on sale in September 2002 for $199 and became the first robot most people owned. It had no map and no plan. It drove until it hit something, turned, and drove again, following a handful of simple behaviours, spiral, wall-follow, random bounce, that added up to a room being cleaned eventually. Its designer Rodney Brooks had argued at MIT since the 1980s that intelligence did not need representation, that behaviour could emerge from simple reactive layers, and the Roomba was that argument as a consumer product.

It sold more than forty million units and outlasted several generations of more ambitious machines. Later models added cameras, mapping and, in the 2020s, learned object recognition to avoid cables and pet accidents, so that the anti-AI robot acquired AI by accretion. Amazon agreed to buy iRobot in 2022 and abandoned the deal in 2024 under regulatory pressure over the maps of homes the machines had collected.

The Roomba is on this timeline as a corrective. The robots that reached the public first were not the ones that reasoned. They were the ones that were cheap, worked, and asked for nothing.