Roomba!
Prompted by an article on Slashdot, I decided to get a Roomba. eBay, of course, was the only way to go, and I bought one new-in-box. It arrived last night.
I plugged it in to charge it at 7, but it wasn't done charging at 8 this morning (though the manual says that the charge cycle is 12 hours). So I left it at home. Otherwise, I would have brought it to work to play with.
I haven't even used it once, but I'm already impressed with the support from the company. There's a Yahoo Groups group for the Roomba, and I posted a question that I had. There is some maintenance that you need to do to the Roomba every so often, that involves cleaning the brushes. The manual explains how to unclip the Brush Coupler by pushing a tab. I pushed the tab but couldn't get anything to unclip. So I emailed the list.
This morning, I had a reply in my inbox from Jonathan Klein, who is the "Principal Designer, Director of Usability | Accessibility" for iRobot, who explained that the manual was in error, and that the correct procedure involved unscrewing the coupler.
Nice support!