Odds are that your first domestic robot will be – or already is - a vacuum cleaner. According to the Chinese manufacturer Roborock, we’ve been sharing our homes with robotic cleaning devices for nearly three decades – the first robot vacuum was Electrolux’s Trilobite, originally announced in December 1997.
At around the same time as the Swedish company’s puck-shaped, radar-controlled machine, the American start-up iRobot was gearing up to launch the Roomba, which eventually came to market in 2002 and enjoyed a certain cachet with the first wave of loft-living dot-commers.
