Hackers Love to Vacuum

Create was unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year and starts at $130. Since there's no vacuum cleaner built into the Create, tinkerers will have more space to load the product up with whatever their hearts desire.

The company had an in-house contest among its roboticists to give the system a test drive. One scientist designed a robot that can fetch a drink out of the fridge. Another attached a plastic ball containing a hamster to the top of the device; the Roomba was programmed to move in the direction the hamster moved.

Goofiness aside, Roomba's creator, iRobot, was a spinoff of really-very-serious research conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology regarding commercial applications for robotics. The Roomba's pricier cousins, called PackBots, are employed by military personnel overseas to scan for landmines and defuse bombs. Sales are also pretty serious: Last year, the company's line of home robots -- there's also a floor-mopping version and a heavy-duty version designed to clean workshop floors -- sold 725,000 units.

One of iRobot's executives was in town a few years back, before it was clear whether the company's home appliance would turn out to be something cool or the sort of cheesy product sold on late-night infomercials. "I never thought I'd end up as a vacuum cleaner salesman," he joked.

IRobot's chairman and co-founder, Helen Greiner, said recently she has hopes for even newer products that go beyond hamster balls and labor-saving trips to the fridge. "We want to make use of the energy that's out there in the robotic field and figure out ways to bring it back into our company," she said.

In other words, iRobot is going to keep an eye on what clever programmers do with Create -- partly in the hopes that somebody might come up with a new use for the device that enhances Roomba or could even turn into a new product line for the company. "Anything could happen," she said.

I borrowed a Create from iRobot and lent it to the robotics team at McKinley Technology High School in the District about a week ago. The students there were already preoccupied with a big robotics competition the school is hosting today, but the team's coach, Kenneth Lesley, mostly likes the Create.

The system might be a little too complex for the average high school robotics class, but "it's a very interesting little unit, it's got a lot of capabilities," he said. "I can see all sorts of possibilities with it."