I think you are looking it the wrong way. It's very easy to come up with things that are not possible, but not very useful exercise. Technology evolves in the d

I think you are looking it the wrong way. It's very easy to come up with things that are not possible, but not very useful exercise. Technology evolves in the direction of what is possible and useful now. The original Roomba came into being when it was possible for something as dumb as a doormat to navigate the house. Other applications of the same algorithm are already happening - Husqvarna uses the same random walk to mow the lawn, and there are other robots that will weed the garden. I have a retired engineering mate who armed himself with 3D printer, a CAD package and an eBay account to construct his own automatic lawn mower. It doesn't use a random walk - it uses the 8mm precision of an RTK GPS to go through a planned an arbitrarily complex path. 8mm is good enough for all sorts tasks of course - like hedge trimming, cleaning outside windows and using compressed air to clean gutters. Inside the house Roomba's mates have already evolved. They now know where they are in the house, which was introduced to allow them to resume where they left off. But it has also meant they can have virtual boundaries, which means the can be told where the border between time tiles and barriste carpet is so some of them are sporting mops now. Cleaning walls, side webs of ceilings and bathrooms can't be too far away. Dusting will follow shortly thereafter. The point is these things evolve. I don't know what point you say it isn't a Roomba any more, I daresay it won't be obvious - I'm sure you will say the current lawnmowers are just Roomba's with blades. However while something that puts a wet rag on a wall won't be much smarter than today's vacuum cleaners, it won't look like a Roomba. I think the explosion week come with imaging. I don't mean image recognition - just the recognition of 3D boundaries of objects - things like walls, bench tops, obstacles on the floor, where the windows and mirrors that need to be cleaned are, where cupboard doors that can open and shut are, where dishwashers that contain round flat things like plates that always go into the same place into those cupboards are - this is how things will evolve. I agree we won't see a Boston dynamics style robot in the house time soon. What we will get will be far dumber, and far more useful.