The Roomba has left the Kitchen


The Roomba has left the Kitchen

I got my Mom a Roomba for Christmas 2003 and she’s been using it ever since… this was the first time she couldn’t find it.

My Mom, frantic to find her Roomba, sent me an IM this afternoon:

It turns out that she found it a few minutes later:

I wonder if it was planning on emptying out its dirt catcher in the toilet or if it just needed some privacy. As we add more and more autonomous technology to our lives I expect we will start see more and more strange behavior over time. It will be interesting to see what sort of emergent behavior we will see as devices like this start to communicate with the rest of your house and make decisions based on a larger set of knowledge. Maybe it knew the bathroom floor needed cleaning because the toilet sent it a message?