Lightning--or rather, lint--didn't strike until 2002, when Irobot debuted the Roomba.

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Why is iRobot, purveyor of the Roomba and Scooba home-cleaning robots, making a three-to-five-foot tall robot with an Apple iPad for a head?

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But no worries, none of the three robovacuums I tried out--the Karcher RC3000 RoboCleaner , the Electrolux Trilobite and the Roomba Discovery from iRobot --are on the verge of giving an old-fashioned upright a run for its money.

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Robotics manufacture iRobot, which manufactures cleaning robots such as the Roomba, Looj and Scooba, announced today that it has acquired Evolution Robotics, which manufactures the Mint cleaning robot.

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The present generation of factory robots is akin to early mainframe computers in offices, reckons Rodney Brooks, a co-founder of iRobot, an American firm whose products include the Roomba, a robotic vacuum-cleaner, as well as military robots.

ECONOMIST: Automation

And instead of a drag on the bottom line, Roomba has subsidized the development of what Angle hopes is the next big step for iRobot: health care.

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