Roomba
iRobot released a vacuum that cleaned a room with no map and no plan: it moved by simple rules and changed mode when it met an obstacle.
Why it matters
Millions of autonomous robots entered homes, and not one of them had a world model or a goal in the symbolic sense.
The company’s co-founders included Rodney Brooks, author of the subsumption architecture, with Colin Angle and Helen Greiner. Instead of building a map the robot moved in a spiral until its bumper touched an obstacle, then cleaned along the wall, then began a new spiral or some straight runs; over time it covered each part of the room two to five times. That proved effective enough and far cheaper: it sold for $199.95. Mapping appeared only in the 2015 models.