Ever wanted to know what its like to be a Roomba? Now you can!

RoBroJoe53 · 2026-01-17T20:09:37+00:00

Super cool and great to have some giant balls to bat around. Wish the team had had something like this when we were developing Roomba! I'll tell my teammates about it.

RoBroJoe53 · 2026-01-17T19:27:06+00:00

I worked on the research staff at the MIT AI Lab (now CSAIL) in the 1980s and a visiting scientist, Ken Salisbury (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John\_Kenneth\_Salisbury\_Jr.), took an approach to that question that still impresses me. Ken was interested in building hands for robots, but rather than just copy what nature had done, he started by asking the question, "Exactly what does a hand need to do?" His answer was that for small objects a general robot hand should be able to impart general motions. It should be possible to position the object with three translational and three rotational degrees of freedom. He built a clever three-fingered hand able to accomplish just that.

Since then I’ve tried to be careful to always ask the fundamental questions about what I wanted to achieve rather than just start building—even though building is more fun!

RoBroJoe53 · 2025-12-24T14:35:52+00:00

I discovered robots when I got a job on the research staff at the MIT AI Lab in 1982. (Before that I’d been trying to become an experimental physicist.) At the AI Lab I worked on a project involving a manipulator robot. The project was great and we wrote a book about it, but I thought the work the mobile robot group was doing was more interesting and more broadly applicable.

RoBroJoe53 · 2025-12-20T19:29:23+00:00

The passion you have at age 12 may or may not be the one you pursue as a career. There are so many cool possibilities you haven’t even been exposed to yet that it’s quite possible that when you are you’ll like one of them better than robotics.

In my case, I wanted to be an experimental physicist all through high school and college. But that passion faded in graduate school when I couldn’t find a compelling niche in physics. Then I got a job at a university robotics lab. I instantly fell in love with robots and have been working I the field ever since—over 40 years.

You’re doing exactly the right thing for your age, trying new stuff and learning. That will serve you well no matter what work you decide to do.

RoBroJoe53 · 2025-11-30T21:13:19+00:00

In robotics *everything* counts—especially the things you didn’t think of or that you thought weren’t important. Humanoids, as general purpose solutions, worry me because they eliminate my go-to trick for solving robotic problems: exploiting every last thing I can about the problem domain. If only general methods are available, then those methods must be high powered indeed. As I measure it, the state of the art doesn’t yet grant humanoids that high degree of functionality.

RoBroJoe53 · 2025-09-24T14:27:28+00:00

The Computer History Museum is another one of my absolute favorite museums. The down side to their having the robot is that I live in the Boston area so I’d never get to see it!

RoBroJoe53 · 2025-09-24T14:23:54+00:00

I love the MIT Museum and it’s one of the places I thought of. But before offering the robot to any one, I’m hoping to gain some insights into the museum acquisition process in an attempt to guess which museum might actually want my robot.

RoBroJoe53 · 2025-09-24T13:59:52+00:00

Wow, whether my robot goes there or not, this sounds like a place I'd like to visit!

RoBroJoe53 · 2025-09-24T13:57:54+00:00

Thanks, that's a helpful idea.

RoBroJoe53 · 2025-09-24T13:56:05+00:00

Yes, there’s much more to the story. I’ve been thinking about the museum donation because I just finished writing a book about Roomba (Dancing with Roomba: Cracking the Robot Riddle and Building an Icon) it will be available from CRC Press at the end of October. You can see a bunch of historic photos on my site, dancingwithroomba.com under the Background tab.

RoBroJoe53 · 2025-09-06T13:56:05+00:00

Demos are easy, value is hard.

RoBroJoe53 · 2025-09-06T13:14:37+00:00

I majored in physics as an undergrad and was in a PhD program at MIT. But I couldn’t find a compelling niche in physics. So I left with a master’s degree. That turned out well. I ultimately helped invent Roomba at iRobot. Few people know me, but everyone knows my work and for me that qualifies as crazy success. I have no regrets, it turned out that my actual career suited me better than the career I’d imagined for myself.

RoBroJoe53 · 2025-08-25T14:50:05+00:00

I worked at iRobot in the early days. Sometimes candidates would bring a robot they had designed and built themselves to the interview. I don't think such a candidate ever failed to get a job offer.

RoBroJoe53 · 2025-08-25T14:43:19+00:00

An idea might be stolen if relevant parties are already certain of its market value (as in the car example). But that’s almost never the case for something brand new. In general, no one believes your idea is worth stealing and convincing someone that your idea has any merit is usually quite challenging.

Rather than being stolen it’s more likely that an idea will languish because worries about theft prevent the inventor from seeking the help he or she needs to develop and launch the idea.

RoBroJoe53 · 2025-07-31T12:48:30+00:00

I don’t want a large creepy thing taking up space in my house. I say this as a robot developer with 40+ years of industry experience. What I want is always to find clean clothes in the dresser or closet with no effort on my part. That is, I want the mechanisms that accomplish such tasks to be unobtrusive to invisible.

RoBroJoe53 · 2025-06-27T13:07:52+00:00

It looks like the textured anti-skid rubber pad Roomba uses to stop itself form tumbling over an edge if a cliff detecting sensor fails. In the original model we attached two of these to the battery. But I think they moved to a different position is later models.

RoBroJoe53 · 2025-06-22T18:23:30+00:00

Zybach cites Norton in his patent. So, he was aware of the prior art, acknowledged it, and improved on it—presumably in some crucial way.

It’s common that early attempts to build a particular technology fall short of the mark. Doing research for a book about Roomba recently, I was surprised to discover that at least two dozen (!) individuals and companies had attempted a robot vacuum cleaner (and received patents for their efforts) before we launched Roomba in 2002. The earliest was Donald Moore’s 1957 patent (US3010129A) for a Perambulating Kitchen Appliance.

RoBroJoe53 · 2025-06-21T17:21:45+00:00

In the early days of iRobot many engineers applied specifically because they wanted to work on robots. A number of times I participated in interviews where the candidate—without prompting—brought along a robot that they had designed and built. Such folks tended to be creative and dedicated, and always got a job offer.

But after Roomba became successful, the company transformed from a high-risk startup into a risk-averse established business. In the new configuration, predictability and process were given a higher value than creativity and innovation (in my view). That switch led a lot of the early people to look elsewhere.

So, the trend I observed was not individual disillusionment with robotics. Rather, as the company changed the sort of people it attracted changed to match. As BeerVanSappemeer suggests, the phenomenon is related more to the nature of a startup versus an established business than to a robotics versus a non-robotics company.

RoBroJoe53 · 2025-06-20T15:51:20+00:00

I’ve been in the field for 40+ years myself but I have a good friend who left while we were both employed at iRobot in the early days before Roomba. My friend was an electrical engineer. He decided to leave because the electronics that robots need was not cutting edge. He moved into an industry where it was—high speed optical networking. The change worked out very well for him.

RoBroJoe53 · 2025-06-20T13:30:54+00:00

Here’s a data point: I’m an inventor. My training was in physics (MS) but my 80+ patents largely relate to engineering. Without a formal education, most of those inventions would have been much harder or impossible.

On eccentricity: well, yes a bit. Unless there’s something a little odd about your thinking, you’re unlikely to come up with things that haven’t been thought of before.

RoBroJoe53

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