I had been thinking a lot about robotics even before yesterday’s announcement that iRobot (makers of the Roomba) is going public. But now that the biggest manufacturer of consumer robots will get the cash to rapidly expand their offerings, I think we may be on the verge of a big wave of robotic innovation. Maybe one day, if the IPO goes well, and others follow, we’ll all be talking about the big robot bubble of the late aughts.

(There are also a whole lotta other things ready to explode - including digital media, my other big interest as of late - but for now I’m just talking about robotics.)

For the past few months, I’ve noticed a lot of hacktivity surrounding simple robots, and I myself have felt an increasing urge to polish off my solder iron and melt some metal. There seems to be a lot of activity in the robotics area recently, of the sort that only true geeks will appreciate. I may be young, but I remember what using a computer was like back in the days of DOS and BBSes, and I have to say that robotics looks a lot like that right now. More importantly, homebrew robotics feels like the old frontier of the internet.

We all know coding has become a commodity, but knowing how to build a light-sensitive bot or an etch-a-sketch interface for your computer? That’s interesting. And it really appeals to my art/tech creativity. With all this puppet building that’s going on, I’m getting excited about building physical things again. And physical things that can eat my code and do something with it? Even better! I throw my hands up at new programming languages until they can control my vacuum.

As soon as my show opens and I have more than a minute or two to spare, I’m going to sit down and learn me to build some robots.