Your Pet Roomba Sucks

Perhaps it's a marketing ploy by iRobot, perhaps it's just a post-Christmas psychological defense mechanism for buyer's remorse, but people are talking about their emotional attachment to Roomba vacuums.

According to the Washington Post, people are naming them. (Apparently Rosie is the most popular.) They're putting little googly eyes on them so they don't scare the kids. They pretend that, when the little noise machine darts in and out from under the couch, it's playing peek-a-boo with them, not just getting confused by the dust bunnies that fight back under there.

This is not the woomba people! It's a vacuum cleaner. When you get over the fact that something man made can move on its own you'll likely realize that it's pretty damn dumb, even by pet standards. You'll see that you have to set up little robotic invisible fences so that the thing doesn't head out the door or try to joust the scooba in the next room. You'll see that you still need to vacuum your own stairs. You'll notice the real flesh and blood pets quivering in the corner when you come home because their sensitive hearing and instincts to protect your house have been violently violated in your absence. And finally, when you're honor student toddler takes a liking to those little sandcrawler-looking virtual walls and heads off to play with his new nerf herder playset, it will meet up with the scooba in the kitchen, access its swarm programming, and head off to sweep and mop up the cat.

In the mean time iRobot is coming out with the next generation. While we already know they will be introducing a "hacker friendly" roomba sometime soon, they also recently sent out this invitation to many robot fan sites which seems to indicate that they will be venturing a bit further into the consumer space, going robo-a-robo with Wowee's robosapien and the Asahi beer bot.

Source Washington Post and Robot Stock News