Roomba

Roomba launched on September 17, 2002 from iRobot, an MIT spinoff founded in 1990 by Rodney Brooks, Colin Angle, and Helen Greiner. The idea traced back to engineer Joe Jones, who had tinkered with a self-driving cleaner since the late 1980s; S.C. Johnson funded development in 1999 before withdrawing, and iRobot pushed the product out on its own.

The early Roombas were charmingly simple — they didn't map a room so much as roam it, wandering in a semi-random pattern and changing direction whenever their bumper hit a wall or chair leg. It didn't matter. The novelty of a little robot that cleaned the floor while you did something else was irresistible, and iRobot sold a million of them by 2004. Later generations added real navigation with cameras and visual mapping.

Its most enduring cultural moment came not from advertising but from the internet, where cats and small dogs riding slowly around the living room atop a Roomba became a defining early viral-video genre. The original model now sits in the Smithsonian, and by 2020 iRobot had sold more than 30 million home robots — but the 2000s is when the robot vacuum went from science fiction to a thing in your neighbor's kitchen.