Morticia is quite the capable robot.

She can scramble over the outback at about 15 kilometers per hour, climb stairs, survive a 10-meter drop onto a concrete floor and even navigate underwater. Not bad for a little critter that's less than 20 centimeters high and 65 centimeters long-about the size of a small suitcase.

Created under a U.S. Department of Defense contract by an MIT spinoff company called iRobot, Morticia is a military machine with a mission. Instead of carrying bombs, she carries eyes and ears, transmitting what she sees back over a wireless link. She is also a pioneer, showing us how robots are likely to be integrated into our jobs and our lives in the coming years.

I met two of the cofounders of iRobot, Colin Angle and Helen Greiner, more than 15 years ago when they were students working on artificial cockroaches at the MIT Robotics Lab. I wasn't impressed. So when I learned a couple of years ago that Professor Rodney Brooks had formed a company with them to commercialize the cockroach technology, I pretty much wrote the whole thing off.