“My Roomba is Rambo”: Intimate Home Appliances

Robots have entered our domestic lives as pets, caretakers and vacuum cleaners. Yet, little is known about their impact on the home. This paper takes first steps towards addressing this omission, by reporting on results from an empirical study of iRobot’s Roomba –a vacuuming robot—that examined adoption and use. Our findings suggest that, by developing intimacy to the robot, our participants were able to derive increased pleasure from cleaning, and expended effort to fit Roomba into their homes and share with others. These findings lead us to propose four design implications that we argue could increase people’s enthusiasm for smart home technologies.