May 15, 2005

Robot Child-Herders

Roomba_discovery_lgWe have a Roomba Discovery, which we love. It does an amazingly good job of cleaning the children's playroom, but perhaps not in exactly the way its inventors at iRobot intended.

Although it's fine at sucking up dirt, finding its way around the room and returning to its charging station, its real achievement is in not only getting the children to clean up their toys first but also tiring them out before bed.

This works with three magic phrases: 

  1. "Roomba's coming out tonight. Clean up your toys or Roomba will eat them!" 
  2. "If you can clean them up fast you can stay up to watch Roomba!" 
  3. "Here goes Roomba. Don't let him touch you!"

The uttering of these three sentences results in the perfect end to an evening. The kids scurry around and pick up every last toy (it's the tiniest Lego pieces that get eaten the fastest), then race around the room jumping over Roomba as it drives from wall to wall, randomly changing direction just often enough to make the game fun. (We've told them that if Roomba runs into them it will think that they're a wall and not clean there, which may or may not be true.) Then, after 15 minutes of this, they're bored and ready for bed.

I love the thought that our children are growing up used to having domestic robots in the house. Robots for them are slightly dim but friendly vacuum cleaners, not fearsome weapons or fantasy toys. "Robot love me," declares the two-year-old.

May 15, 2005 12:26:32 PM | Friday Fanboy

46 Comments

David Orban

This is a great story, reminiscent of Asimov's "Robbie".

Just as there are generations who were more at ease with the joystick than the console's controller, or those for whom the walkman is more familiar than the portable mp3 player, now there will be those among us who will have a hard time to adjust, while the ever-changing zeitgest of kids growing up is colored by the reassuring presence of domestic robots.

Posted by: David Orban | May 15, 2005 at 02:57 PM

John Ballard

Love it!
I had to blog about it.

Posted by: John Ballard | May 15, 2005 at 04:58 PM

Danny O'Brien

It may be because her mother Quinn is doing so much robot research at the moment, but I've been surprised by how wide the range of things that Ada will (correctly) identify as a robot. She'll shout "robot!" as enthusiastically at your classical "robot man" image (and demand we draw one on her t-shirt) but she'll also do the same at pictures of a Roomba or one of those pile-of-PCBs-and-a-UV-sensor wheelies. I think she identifies "robot" as "animal made of plastic".

Posted by: Danny O'Brien | May 15, 2005 at 05:23 PM

Reinder

Your plastic pal who's fun to be with!

Posted by: Reinder | May 16, 2005 at 01:03 PM

Daniel H. Wilson

As a robotics person I love to hear stories like this. Hopefully the next generation of Americans won't be so afraid of robots. Now, I'll plug a book that people can read in the meantime... "How to Survive a Robot Uprising" is available for pre-order on Amazon... ha ha ha

www.robotuprising.com

Posted by: Daniel H. Wilson | May 16, 2005 at 01:14 PM

Pam

thought you might find this funny

Posted by: Pam | May 16, 2005 at 07:05 PM

Andy King

You see this? This guy wrote an excellent article about tbe Long Tail Theory in Wired and now he writes whatever crap he comes up with and everybody praises him like Budda... wtf!

Posted by: Andy King | May 17, 2005 at 12:47 AM

George

Cute story. We also have a Roomba in our household. The first time we let it run and then dock itself, our 4 year-old sat down on the floor next to it and stroked it's "back", talking to it as if it were a puppy. He has since learned that it doesn't actually respond to him like this, but he still considers it as more of a pet than an appliance. Perhaps it's time to get a Golden Retreiver for him...

Posted by: George | May 18, 2005 at 11:16 AM

Misty

I thought it was my ten month old's job to clean the floor of debris, by eating it. I foresee a dual between baby and Roomba. Let the betting begin.

Posted by: Misty | May 21, 2005 at 02:05 PM

Roomba

Wow. I love the roomba idea as a kid nany. I was hopeing to see a day when every one can buy a honda Asimo. But we have a roomba and it does work well at keep the floor cleans and the dogs on the couch. The problem is if you do not want the dogs on the couch...

Posted by: Roomba | December 02, 2005 at 06:15 AM

Ashley Bowers

I am hoping to get one for Christmas I have dogs and I think it would help out alot on getting thigns up after they chew up stuff!

Posted by: Ashley Bowers | December 22, 2005 at 06:22 AM

Mik

I think that would keep our grand kids amused,have to invest in one of those.

Mik

Posted by: Mik | February 10, 2006 at 11:16 AM

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Posted by: af | December 19, 2007 at 09:12 AM

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Fallows has an interesting column in the the NY Times about the power of that other low-cost P2P distribution network, the US Mail. He focuses mostly on the Netflix example (mentioning Long Tail implications) and then brings in others: "Consider Postal Service fulfillment of transactions made on the Internet. About two million prescriptions a day - roughly one-fifth of the total - are delivered by first-class mail. EBay's vendors list five million new items daily, and those that are sold ship mainly by mail. One Pitney Bowes study found that online retailers were increasingly using paper catalogs sent through the mail to steer people to their sites."

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Lowering the economic costs of niches is key to the Long Tail, especially for small purchases such as a single track. I mentioned in the post on variable pricing that below $0.49/track the transaction costs of processing the payment can start to get in the way. So the news that PayPal is changing its policies to encourage smaller transaction is good to hear. From the report: "PayPal’s transaction fee is typically volume-based, and ranges from 1.9 to 2.9 percent in addition to a charge of $0.30 per transaction. In the case of [the new model for] micro payments, which PayPal describes as payments of less than $2, the fee is 5 percent plus $0.05 per transaction."

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