Instead of candy, flowers or jewelry, Rebecca Condict's husband gave her an appliance for her 29th birthday — and he's not sleeping on the couch.

That's because the appliance in question is an iRobot Roomba Vacuuming Robot.

Unlike a canister or upright vacuum that demands a certain effort on the part of its owner, the Roomba automatically vacuums a room with the push of a button.

"It makes less work for me," Condict says. "We both work, and I can run it while I'm making dinner and it takes care of itself. All I have to do is empty it."

Condict says the gift was a replacement for a Roomba that broke during the summer after about two years of frequent vacuuming.

She uses the Roomba almost daily to keep the hardwood floors in her Yonkers, N.Y., apartment free of the ample hair shed by her two cats.

"I told him I really wanted another one," she says. "It's much better than having to sweep the floor every day."

Taking the grunt work out of dull and dirty tasks like vacuuming is the mission of Roomba's maker, iRobot of Burlington, Mass.

Started in 1990 by three robotics scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, iRobot also helps keep humans out of harm's way in Iraq and Afghanistan with a military robot called the PackBot.

But it's the Roomba that has put iRobot in the spotlight as the first company to build a successful mass-produced, practical robot.

More than 1.5 million Roomba vacuums have been sold since the product was introduced in late 2002.

At 3 1/2 inches high and 13 inches wide, the Frisbee-shaped Roomba is small enough to clean under beds and furniture and smart enough to avoid stairs and other obstacles.

The second generation of Roombas came out in 2004 with new features, such as a self-charging home base.

"This is all about giving people time back and improving their quality of life," says Colin Angle, iRobot's chief executive officer.

The increasing popularity of the Roomba boosted sales at iRobot by 75 percent in 2004, from $54.3 million to $95 million. Last year, iRobot had sales of $95 million in the first nine months alone.

The success of iRobot is being celebrated by robotics experts across the country who expect more money and attention to pour into the effort to create practical robots for the home.

Unlike Sony's Aibo dog or Lego's Mindstorms, the Roomba is not a novelty.

"It's a real milestone. It's a consumer product that's a robot, and it's not a robot toy. It's demonstrated that there is a real market out there," says Matthew T. Mason, director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

In its short life, the Roomba has already won devotion from customers reminiscent of that lavished on TiVo and the Apple iPod.

Just as those products have changed the way people watch TV and listen to music, the Roomba changes how people clean — mostly by freeing them from the task, says Neena Buck, vice president of emerging frontiers at Strategy Analytics, a research and consulting firm in Newton, Mass.

"If you ever get one, you'll ask yourself why did you ever push around a vacuum when it can do it on its own," she says. "You come home expecting clean floors."

Next up for iRobot is another floor-cleaning robot — but this one washes, scrubs and dries hard floors.

The Scooba is available for sale on iRobot's Web site (www.irobot .com) now and will be in stores early this year.

What's made the Roomba so important to robotics, Buck says, isn't its technology as much as its price. It sells for $150 to $330.

There are competing robotic vacuums by European manufacturers, notably the Trilobite from Electrolux and the RoboCleaner from Karcher.

Both have more sophisticated technology than the Roomba, but the correspondingly higher price tag — $1,000 plus — has doomed them commercially, Buck says.

The biggest challenge in marketing Scooba will be the same one that's limited the Roomba to less than 1 percent of the $3.4 billion vacuum market: People worry that it won't do the job.

"There is almost universal skepticism among people who haven't tried the Roomba," Angle says. "They think, 'How could something so small clean my house?' "

That's been fueled in part by mixed reviews. The Roomba fared just so-so in Consumer Reports magazine's review in February 2004. The magazine, published by Yonkers-based Consumers Union, says the Roomba wasn't a replacement for a traditional vacuum because it takes longer to clean a room and doesn't provide deep cleaning.

On the flip side are customers who have become cheerleaders, creating Web pages and starting online discussion groups devoted to the Roomba.

"One of the things I always hear is, 'Does it work or is it just a toy?' One of the reasons it has gained a successful following is that people who own one and love it tell their friends," says robotics analyst Buck.