In September 2002 iRobot launched the Roomba, a disc-shaped robot that vacuums a floor on its own. It was not a research demo or an industrial arm but a product ordinary people could buy and run at home. The Roomba navigated rooms, avoided obstacles, sensed dirtier areas, and adjusted to different floor types without a person steering it.
iRobot was founded by MIT roboticists - Colin Angle, Helen Greiner, and Rodney Brooks - and the Roomba carried forward a behavior-based approach to robotics: rather than building a perfect internal map and planning every move, the robot reacts to its immediate surroundings using a set of simple behaviors that combine into competent room coverage. That philosophy traces directly to Brooks’s earlier academic work on reactive robots.
The commercial scale is what makes Roomba a milestone. In a January 2010 press release, iRobot reported that sales of its home robots had surpassed five million units since the 2002 launch, calling them among the best-selling consumer robots in history. CEO Colin Angle framed the goal as building “practical robots that help people accomplish tasks they don’t like to do.”
The Roomba is AI-adjacent rather than a showcase of machine learning, but it mattered: it normalized the idea of an autonomous machine operating unsupervised in everyday human spaces, years before self-driving cars made the same promise on public roads.