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iRobot's new Scooba floor-cleaning robot is a great idea - Robert Heinlein's! He specified what was needed in his 1956 novel The Door Into Summer. It took humanity only fifty years to go from the Hired Girl robot idea to reality:
What Hired Girl would do... was clean floors . . . any floor, all day long and without supervision... It swept, or mopped, or vacuum-cleaned, or polished, consulting tapes in its idiot memory to decide which. Anything larger than a BB shot it picked up and placed in a tray on its upper surface, for someone brighter to decide whether to keep or throw away. It went quietly looking for dirt all day long, in search curves that could miss nothing, passing over clean floors in its endless search for dirty floors... Around dinnertime it would go to its stall and soak up a quick charge...
Vise
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