The Readybot prototype, which designers say “looks like a dishwasher, but with arms,” is shown rolling out of it’s kitchen storage area into a typical family room. It picks up toys, uses a special carpet rake tool to scrape up small items into plastic bins, moving sideways and diagonally as needed to reach tight spots. It stores the bins in a cabinet, closes the door, and then empties trash receptacles. In a surprise move, Readbot deploys one of the popular off-the-shelf cleaning robots, which scoots out to vacuum the carpet.

Why didn’t the Readybot team design their own vacuum attachment? “The vacuum robots are inexpensive, very well designed, and can be purchased anywhere” said Readybot team lead Tom Benson, “Why should we re-invent something that already works great?”

Benson explains how this fits their group’s view of the future of domestic robotics. “We believe the next and largest wave of the robotics industry will be similar to the personal computer industry. With PCs, the hard disks, monitors, motherboards, and other components are made by different vendors and then assembled into an easy-to-maintain, easy-to-upgrade final product. This has produced the fast growth, cost reduction, and innovation in the PC market. We believe robots will be the same, so that arms, bases, video systems, etc. could be made by different vendors and plugged together. So it makes perfect sense to use an existing vacuum cleaning robot as a peripheral”

This echoes views expressed by others, including an June 2006 article in Scientific American by Microsoft founder Bill Gates , and more recent articles in the press, some of which predict home robots in 3-5 years. “It’s an international phenomenon” said Benson “and the technology is out there. It’s just a matter of putting it together in a market-ready form, and adding a few key software components.”

Readybot also scheduled a new announcement, for what they call “Phase II” of their robot challenge project, for later in the summer of 2008.