"Our robots take on unique roles in our customers’ homes. We hear from people that they often personalize their Roomba and Scooba robots by naming them," said Greg White, executive vice president and general manager, iRobot.

SkinIt lets sucka-wipa owners put their own pictures and messages on their robot.

Puritanically "Skinit reviews each image uploaded and will not product skins with content which is .. explicit or adult in nature." Dang! And why?

Is there a law controlling home graffiti? Might it incite the little buggers to unseemly erotic behavior in the broom closet? Like software, do the Sc/Roombas remain the property of iRobot and you get a non-transferable licence to clean your home?

Are the iRobotSkins staffers so delicate, or morally fragile, the company is protecting them? Surely they’re just robots like the rest of corporate America?

Marketing products of such triviality (Triviabots?) in the grand scheme of things (like home cleaning) ironically provokes some really big questions:

1) When will Abyss make a Rui skin for my Asimo?
2) Is this our Achilles’ heel in dealing with artificial life, cloaking it with warm fuzzy persona?
3) Shouldn’t dispossessed, starving or tortured souls of this small blue planet be taken care of before we obsesses over dumb ring tones or tarted-up robovacs?

Still, it IS a great idea. Go for it here

In medical robotics they don’t come much larger than (life?) SRI International.

SRI pioneered telepresence surgery technology in the 1980s with the development of a telerobotic system that offers a surgeon the full sensory experience of conventional hands-on surgical procedures. SRI’s technology enabled teleoperation over distances, and scaling of motion and force feedback, enabling microsurgical procedures otherwise impossible without robotic assistance.

In 2005, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) contracted SRI to develop a future-generation battlefield-based unmanned medical treatment system, or "trauma pod," to stabilize injured soldiers in the field, administer life-saving medical and surgical care before evac. and during transport.

In 2006 SRI technology successfully demonstrated a remote robotic surgical system as part of the ninth NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) in the Aquarius Underwater Laboratory, located 60 feet underwater and off the coast of Key Largo, Florida.

For the mission, SRI’s robot electronics were redesigned to permit long-distance operation over IP networks. NEEMO 9 marked the first time an entire robotic surgical system was transported to an extreme environment and manipulated successfully from afar.

The medical procedures simulated may one day be used to respond to emergencies on the International Space Station, the moon, or Mars - even extreme environs on Earth, such as Beirut by the Lake.

Major goals of the NEEMO 9 mission were to: 1) evaluate the use of telerobotics in performing emergency diagnostic, surgical and interventional therapies in a confined and extreme environment 2) investigate open questions and operational concepts that will enable NASA to return humans to the moon as part of the President’s Vision for Space Exploration.