Watching the creature roam about our conference room sucking up white paper dots was amazing. Ten years from now, if these devices are commonplace, we'll think nothing of it, but the behavior was simply stunning and lifelike. I was mesmerized, and couldn't stop watching it. I wanted to name it and treat it like a pet.

Speaking of pets, apparently Trilobyte gives cats the willies. That's worth the price of admission alone, I would think. Eureka says it wants to sell the device for less than $1,000. Trilobyte is a prototype-- there are only two in the world. Eureka still needs to figure out how to make the device more battle-hardened so it can survive the average household. But the fundamentals work great, and the user interface, one on-off button, is literally a snap.

Electrolux sells a robotic lawn mower in Europe, and many more household robots are being developed. As Moore's Law drives us inexorably up the power curve, these robots will become more possible. We'll have vacuuming robots and window-washing robots and weed-cutting robots and car-washing robots. Just as the PC begat specialized single-purpose computing devices such as the PlayStation and Palm PDA, Rosie and Irona will morph into a million mechanized devices that each do one thing, but do it really well. We may get to R2D2 and C-3P0 eventually, but probably not for 30 years.

Robots such as Trilobyte are compelling. I would buy one today, if I could.