Roomba

The robot that proved the consumer market was real. Before Roomba, home robots were science fiction. iRobot's robot vacuum sold over 40 million units and fundamentally shifted public perception of what robots could be. It wasn't humanoid, it wasn't flashy — it was a disc that cleaned your floor. Roomba's genius was in its constraints: it did one thing, did it well enough, and was priced for ordinary households. It proved that the path to consumer robotics runs through utility, not spectacle. The design philosophy — simple, reliable, useful — is one every consumer robotics company should study.