Autonomous vacuum maker iRobot is a lot like Tesla, not necessarily by reinventing an existing concept — vacuums, robots and electric cars all existed before these two companies came on the scene — but by imbuing their products with that intangible quirk that makes people sit up and take notice. Just like Tesla inspired the public’s imagination about what an electric vehicle could be and can do, iRobot expanded our view of how domestic robots fit into our homes.
In this meeting, more than twenty-six top experts from the technology sector met. ‘You Are Not Expected to Understand This’: How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World We will discuss how seemingly innocuous code has fundamentally shaped the modern world. Below is an excerpt by Lowen Liu, Upshot Deputy Editor. It describes the creation of iRobot’s Roomba vacuum, and the unlikely feline it inspired. Ambassadors for brands.
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Excerpted with permission ‘You Are Not Expected to Understand This’: How 26 Lines of Code Changed the WorldTorie Bosch edited. Princeton University Press. Copyright © 2022. All rights reserved.
The Code That Launched Millions of Cat Videos
Lowen Liu
Colin Angle, CEO and cofounder at iRobot, said that the Roomba had faced several difficulties in its early days before being saved by two events. With good press and Brookstone as a sales partner, the disc-shaped robot vacuum was able to get off to a great start in 2002. After the company spent heavily to stock its inventory, sales began to slow. In 2003, the company was on the other end of Black Friday with thousands upon thousands of Roombas still unsold in warehouses.
Pepsi’s commercial starring Dave Chappelle aired around the same time. While waiting for a date, Chappelle teases the robot vacuum by drinking soft drinks. The vacuum ends up eating the comedian’s pants—schlupp. Angle remembers that at a team meeting soon after, the head of e-commerce said something like: “Hey, why did sales triple yesterday?” The second transformative moment for the company was the rapid proliferation of cat videos on a new video-sharing platform that launched at the end of 2005. A very specific kind of cat video: felines pawing suspiciously at Roombas, leaping nervously out of Roombas’ paths, and, of course, riding on them. Many cats riding on so many Roombas. It was the best kind of advertising a company could ask for: it not only popularized the company’s product but made it charming. The Roomba was an instant hit.
iRobot was the market leader in a booming robotic vacuum market with 35 million sold by 2020.
The cat videos and the Pepsi ad seem to be tales about early days serendipity, lessons in the power of luck and free advertising. They also appear at first to be hardware stories— stories of cool new objects entering the consumer culture. But the role of the Roomba’s software can’t be underestimated. It’s the programming that elevates the round little suckers from being mere appliances to something more. These pioneering vacuums didn’t just move, but they also chose where to go in a mysterious way. The vacuum gets enough personality in the Pepsi commercial to be a sabotaging companion. In the cat videos the Roomba isn’t just a pet conveyer, but a diligent worker, fulfilling its duties even while carrying a capricious passenger on its back. For the first truly successful household robot, the Roomba couldn’t just do its job well; it had to win over customers who had never seen anything like it.
Like many inventions the Roomba was born out of good fortune and a sense of inevitability. It was the brainchild of iRobot’s first hire, former MIT roboticist Joe Jones, who began trying to make an autonomous vacuum in the late 1980s. He joined iRobot as a member in 1992. The company’s expertise grew over the years through other projects. The company created a small, efficient multithreaded system and learned how to build toys for Hasbro. They also developed cleaning knowledge while building large floor sweepers. It was a little like learning to paint a fence and wax a car and only later realizing you’ve become a Karate Kid.
The first Roombas needed to be cheap—both to make and (relatively) to sell—to have any chance of success reaching a large number of American households. There was a seemingly endless list of constraints: a vacuum that required hardly any battery power, and navigation that couldn’t afford to use fancy lasers—only a single camera. The machine wasn’t going to have the ability to know where it was in a room or remember where it had been. It had to use heuristic methods, which combined trial and error with pre-programmed responses to different inputs. If the Roomba were “alive,” as the Pepsi commercial playfully suggested, then its existence would more accurately have been interpreted as a progression of instants—Was I just running into something? Do I feel like I am on the edge of something? Do I need to do anything?All conditions that were prepared for in its programming. An insect reacts rather than plans.
All this knowledge, however limited, had to be packed into a tiny chip inside a small plastic frame. It also had to be capable of sucking up dirt. Vacuums, handheld or not, were traditionally bulky and cumbersome, in proportion to the noise and violence they were intended to make. The Roomba was the first to abandon a lot more complex machinery and instead rely on suction which accelerates through a narrow opening made by two rubber strips. It’s a reverse whistle.
However, the original Roombas’ unique movement is still what makes them special. Jones has said that the navigation of the original Roomba appears random but isn’t—every so often the robot should follow a wall rather than bounce away from it. According to Jones’ original patent, Mark Chiappetta (the creator of Roomba) claimed that the system has a combination of a deterministic and random motion. That small bit of unpredictability was pretty good at covering the floor—and also made the thing mesmerizing to watch. The code needed to be able to handle a growing number of situations. As the company discovered new ways to make the robot get stuck or encountered two obstacles simultaneously, new edges were added to the code. All that added up until, just before launch, the robot’s software no longer fit on its allotted memory. Angle called Rodney Brooks, his cofounder and was about to board a transpacific plane. Brooks spent the flight rewriting the code compiler, packing the Roomba’s software into 30 percent less space. The Roomba was created.
Joe Jones left iRobot in 2006 to start his own company, which makes robotic tools for weeding your garden. However, the weeding machines have yet to take over the gardening world. And this brings us to perhaps the most interesting part of the Roomba’s legacy: how lonely it is.
You’d be in good company if you once assumed that the arrival of the Roomba would open the door to an explosion of home robotics. Angle told me that if someone went back in time and let him know that iRobot would build a successful vacuum, he would have replied, “That’s nice, but what else did we really accomplish?” A simple glance around the home is evidence enough that a future filled with robots around the home has so far failed to come true. Why? One, robotics is difficult, as any roboticist can tell you. The Roomba was able to benefit from very few variables. It had a flat floor, a range of obstacles and dirt that is almost the same everywhere. Even that was not enough to allow for dozens of programed behaviors.
As Angle describes it, what makes the Roomba’s success so hard to replicate is how well it satisfied the three biggest criteria for adoption: it performed a task that was unpleasant; it performed a task that had to be done relatively frequently; and it was affordable. Although it is difficult, cleaning the toilets is not a tedious task. Laundry folding is hard but both are possible. Vacuuming a floor, though—well, now you’re talking.
Yet for all the forces that led to the creation of the Roomba, its invention alone wasn’t a guarantee of success. What was it that made cat videos so fun? It’s a question that lies close to the heart of the Roomba’s original navigation system: part determinism, part randomness. My theory is that it wasn’t just the Roomba’s navigation that endeared it to fans—it was how halting and unpredictable that movement could be. The cats weren’t just along for an uneventful ride; they had to catch themselves as the robot turned unexpectedly or hit an object. (One YouTuber affectionately described the vacuum as “a drunk coming home from the bar.”) According to this theory, it’s the imperfection that is anthropomorphic. Robots that can do slapstick better than human feats are more likely to be welcomed into our homes. It’s worth noting that the top-of-the-line Roomba today will map your rooms and store that map on an app, so that it can choose the most efficient lawnmower-like cleaning path. These high-end models no longer require the spiral navigation system. You won’t be bumping into walls.
It is much less enjoyable to watch one of these Roombas clean up a room than it used be. It makes me wonder what would have happened to Roomba had the first robot vacuum been launched after the age smartphones. The Roomba was equipped with the ability to navigate through rooms with confidence and not just stumbling along. It’s not always easy, after all, to trust someone who seems to know exactly where they are going.
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