I had just finished sweeping up in the kitchen, and Julie was running the vacuum in the next room.

That’s when I noticed a catalog on the table, Brookstone’s “Hard-to-Find Tools.”

Flipping through it, I spotted a tool that made me realize we were finally in the 21st century they were selling a robot that helps with the housework.

“What? No way. That’s not a vacuum cleaner,” Julie said, looking over my shoulder.

No, the “Roomba Intelligent FloorVac” doesn’t look like the upright vacuum my daughter had been using. There’s no handle. There’s no plastic tank for a bag. There’s no long cord.

It looks more like a giant portable CD player with wheels.

Criss-crossing until clean

While robots have been a mainstay in industry for decades, the Roomba seems to be the first robot that actually does something useful to leap into our living rooms.

But it doesn’t look a thing like Rosie the Robot, the robot maid from the “Jetsons” cartoon series.

The saucer-shaped Roomba is 13.4 inches in diameter and 3.5 inches tall. Its spinning brushes sweep flat floors, and its vacuum picks up particles in low- to medium-pile carpets.

It also has a spinning brush along its side that helps pick up particles close to the wall.

I went to www.roombavac.com and watched a Flash demo on how it works.

When you start it, it begins traveling in a tight spiral pattern that gets wider and wider until it gently bumps against a wall.

Then it has a sensor that allows it to follow the wall until it gently bumps against another obstacle. It then begins crisscrossing the room, running under furniture and up against walls and changing direction when it gently bumps into something.

It also has a “Cliff Avoidance Sensor” that keeps it from stumbling down a stairway. It eventually covers every inch until it’s finished. Then it beeps, alerting you it’s finished.

The Roomba comes with a “virtual wall unit,” which shoots an infrared beam that acts as a wall to keep the Roomba from entering another room.

It also comes with a battery and a battery charger.

Not at Wal-Mart yet

I gave Arvin Agah a call to see what he thinks.

Agah, a Kansas University associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, teaches robotics and specializes in applied artificial intelligence.

He knew all about the Roomba and its parent company, iRobot, which was started by Rodney Brooks, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor. The company has worked on defense projects for the government and also a toy doll for Hasbro, “My Real Baby,” which has an array of sensors that makes it behave like a 6-month-old.

Agah said the Roomba is sort of like the “mowbots” introduced a couple of summers ago, which use sophisticated navigation systems to travel about the lawns and do their jobs.

I asked him if this was the beginning of a new boom in robots that would be showing up to do little jobs for us in our homes.

“I think it’s exciting. It would be interesting to see how people respond to this,” he said.

He noted the robots are being sold in specialty magazines and stores, such as The Sharper Image. When they’ll really catch on is when you start seeing them on the shelves at Wal-Mart, he said.

Rosie still years away

Agah said A. I. (artificial intelligence) still has a long way to go before we get to the kind of robots that we’ve seen for decades in the movies.

For example, we’re still 10 years away from seeing a robot that can clear the dishes off the table and load the dishwasher for you.

“We’ve covered the simple stuff, but there’s a huge leap to get to the next level,” he said.

He predicted robotics technology might next be embedded into existing appliances, such as putting cameras into dishwashers to see when the dishes are done. We might start seeing personal assistants that follow a person around sort of like having a Palm Pilot that follows you, he said.

Chore avoidance sensor

After Julie and I finished our work, another one of my daughters, Bonnie, suddenly appeared in the kitchen.

She saw what we were looking at and was surprised the Roomba cost only $199.95.

“You’d expect something like that to cost $1,000,” she said. “What do you do, tell it to vacuum and it vacuums?”

A question came to me.

Would a robot ever become smart enough to learn how to make itself scarce when there’s work to be done?

I hope not I already have to deal with that kind of intelligence.