This is a robot.

It is a real, genuine, actual working robot.

It is going to clean my house for me.

I spent a fair number of hours trying to build a vacuum-cleaner robot when I was a kid. I bought what was then an old but not yet vintage Apple IIe to use as the controller, and scavenged the running gear out of one of those electric kiddie cars. I was woefully underprovisioned in electronics knowledge, but I did get a passable maze-exploration algorithm working in simulation. The project never got much further than youthful ambition and a lot of random parts, but it’s still a nostalgic memory.

Here I am a quarter century later, and you can just buy a vacuum cleaner robot off the shelf. I can’t quite believe it’s real; it seems like there ought to be some catch, like it’s going to turn out to be an expensive novelty that doesn’t actually work – but I’m not even an early adopter here! They’ve been around for years now, and people keep buying them! I can’t wait til it finishes charging and sets out on its first cleaning mission.