Introduction

Almost all of us have watched plenty of sci-fi movies that revolve around the same theme: scientists develop a robot that has true consciousness, observes the environment around it and realizes that human beings are an unnecessary part of the equation. Half an hour into the movie and we have an army of intelligent robots that are hell-bent on destroying the human civilization and the protagonist manages to explode a central server or insert a virus into it, deactivating all the robots and saving our civilization. In spite of all this, most of us would like robots to perform various day-to-day activities that we hate doing, freeing up our time for activities that we enjoy a lot more. The commercial success of Roomba is proof that consumers are willing to pay for personal assistants and more importantly, that they do not have a deep mistrust for robots. Perhaps the form factor of a Roomba might be crucial for people to think that in case of a robot uprising, there isn’t much to worry about from a Roomba!.