E-Mail This Article to a Friend Deus ex machina (continued)

If the PackBot is iRobot’s pride and joy, it’s the frisbee-size Roomba that is the company’s bread and butter. The PackBot is used by just handfuls of soldiers and public-safety officials, but the Roomba is hugely popular and becoming more so by the day, exploding both in sales and in terms of its presence on the pop-culture radar. Jay Leno and Jon Stewart have alluded to it in monologues; recently, even Saturday Night Live paid tribute by poking fun in a hilarious mock commercial. Since the product hit the shelves in 2002, more than a million Roombas have been sold.

It may seem weird that the same company makes both robots that are destroyed by terrorist insurgents and robots that are beloved by harried homemakers. But the relationship between iRobot’s two divisions is a simpatico and symbiotic one. For one thing, the revenues from the sales of the Roomba help finance the company’s Government & Industrial division, which otherwise would have to depend entirely on Defense Department contracts. On the other hand, the technological breakthroughs achieved as the PackBot and other robots evolve feed into the consumer side, as iRobot uses the technical tricks from G&I to improve the Roomba even more. "The cleaning algorithms that are used in the Roomba came out of a mine-hunting contract," says Colin Angle. "And the experience the consumer guys have had with low cost, customer importance, and so forth are being leveraged over in the G&I side as PackBot becomes rolled out on larger scales. And realistically, we’re just getting started ... in a few years our consumer robots will have the capabilities that the Government & Industrial robots have had for years now — and more than just algorithms, but whole architectures crossing between divisions."

The Roomba may not be humanoid in shape, but watching it scoot around the room, finding its way around tables and chairs, locating the dirtiest areas of the rug and hovering over them until it’s convinced they’re completely clean, is very cool — and a little creepy. It really does look as if it’s alive. Indeed, says Nancy Dussault, many consumers come to regard this little vacuum as a pet — some even name it.

As the Roomba works over the carpet, acting much like the minesweeper from which it evolved, Dussault does her best to explain what exactly is going on under that simplistic plastic shell. "It uses a bump sensor, it uses a dirt-sensing system, it uses click sensing and wall-following. So it uses a bunch of different sensors, and they all interact together to be a completely autonomous system," she says. "It’s really diligent in how it cleans. It goes everywhere, goes under your bed, gets under your couches. And it spends a great deal of time doing it. It will cover every area of a room three to five times before it shuts itself off. You’d be shocked at how much stuff it picks up. The idea is that you’re supposed to do other things, or not be home. But people end up watching it."

For such an advanced appliance, simplicity was the mantra. "Engineers tend to want to ‘feature creep,’ they want to add stuff to it," says Dussault. " ‘We can make it do this! We can make it do that!’ We keep the focus on price and functionality, putting out a robot that does one thing really, really well: vacuum."

In the future, Dussault says, "I think you are definitely going to see more robots in the home, and you’re going to see multitasking-type ‘Rosies.’ I’m not sure if they’re going to take a humanoid form, but if you look at Rosie, really, she doesn’t have legs, she has wheels, which is a much easier way to get around. A lot of the international robotics companies are working on humanoid-type robots, but that’s extremely difficult and expensive." Instead, look for more robots that follow iRobot’s lead: simple machines that do complex tasks with minimal fuss at a minimum cost. Like the RoboMower, made by Israel’s FriendlyRobotics, or the AquaBot, a computer-controlled automatic pool cleaner.

IF THE Roomba — which sells for about the same ($170 to $280, depending on the model) as a high-end upright vacuum cleaner — promises less housework and more time for more pleasurable domestic pursuits, what do robots in the military really mean for the future of combat? John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an influential think tank that focuses on "innovative approaches to the emerging security challenges of the new millennium," puts it plainly: "I think they’re going to be right up there with gunpowder, steel, and the atomic bomb."

He cites, for example, vehicles like the one-ton autonomous robotic trucks that iRobot teams are toying with. "It basically means that you’re not going to have to ship human truck drivers over there. Which means that you’re not going to have to ship cooks over there to cook for the human truck drivers. And you’re not going to have to ship the guards over to guard the cooks who cook for the truck drivers. It means an enormous contraction in the number of people required to achieve a given level of combat power."

And though the PackBots aren’t yet weaponized, they have the potential to be, like the TALON robots from Foster-Miller. "They will go places that no human being will go," says Pike.

We’ve already seen unmanned aerial drones blowing up Al Qaeda bad guys in Afghanistan. Does Pike ever envision a war where the majority of the combatants — on our side, at least — are robots? "Right now? No. But give it 15 years, and you will have armed robots with a substantial degree of autonomy. These robots will kill without compunction. They are utterly remorseless. That produces another quantum magnification of combat power.... It’s an army of snipers. Snipers who are infinitely brave and merciless."

Have we quite sorted out the moral angles of all this, the implications of using automatons, armed or not, to do our dirty work? "No," says Pike, "because I don’t think people have quite wrapped themselves around how far this might go."

Indeed, much about this paradigm shift in robo-human relations still needs sorting out. But that will happen soon enough. In the meantime, it’s clear that things are changing rapidly, in real and significant ways. "I think that we’re seeing the beginning of a new industry here," says Colin Angle. "The writing’s on the wall that this is actually going to happen."

Mike Miliard can be reached at mmiliard[a]phx.com