We Need Robots

Both Japan and America face similar 21st-century challenges, the biggest of which is probably the care of our rapidly aging populations. Japan, Korea, and other Asian nations are working double-time to try to develop home-care robots that can, for example, retrieve medicine and even carry the infirm from bed to bathroom and back.

Americans, on the other hand, are less interested in robots that can work hand-in-hand with us than those that can work under our hands. There's an obvious comfort level with the now five-year-old iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaner. It doesn't look like us or any of our pets. We understand that there is some intelligence in there, but we are not threatened by it. If iRobot had made a 4-foot-tall Roomba with a face and a hand to hold a vacuum hose, the company wouldn't have sold more than ten units. Instead, it sold more than two million Frisbee-shaped, personality-free bots. And iRobot is sticking to this strategy. The company's two newest robots, the Looj and the ConnectR, are exemplars of functional design. The Looj is built to churn through rain-gutter muck, and the only nod to anything living is its green color. iRobot's telepresence robot, the ConnectR, may have been the company's greatest opportunity to build a warm, friendly, humanlike bot, but instead, iRobot went with a variation on the Roomba Frisbee theme. (On the other hand, Spyke, another surveillance robot from Erector, has a head and arms, but they're essentially nonfunctional props.) iRobot knows what it's doing.—next: The Confused American >