Robotic ceramic hob cleaner
Problem: Cleaning a ceramic hob is hard work, repetitive and boring.
Solution: A robot to do it. I’m thinking of something pretty similar to the iRobot Roomba, which is a robotic vacuum cleaner. It wanders around aimlessly, turns around whenever it hits anything and, by luck more than good judgement, eventually it cleans your living room floor. Unless your living room is as untidy as ours, in which case it ends up plaintively beeping in the corner chewing on a shoelace or humping one of the drawstrings from the blinds.
Anyway, a hob-cleaning robot would have a more simple time of it. Hobs are, by and large, square, and the surface is exceptionally flat. So it should be relatively easy to cover the whole surface without having to do too much random wandering or getting stuck on things. I think it would probably do a first pass of laying down hob cleaning fluid and scrubbing, with perhaps the opportunity to do a tough-scraping pass on any dirt that was particularly stubborn. It will be $199, after a mail-in rebate. It will be blue.