Your alarm goes off in the morning.  You roll over, hit the snooze button on the alarm clock, and go back to sleep. 

It goes off again a few minutes later.  Snooze button again. 

And again. 

And again.

It's a problem familiar to many of us.  But what if the next time you rolled over to hit the snooze button, what if the alarm clock wasn't there, but instead had wandered to the other side of the room?

That's the idea that Gauri Nanda, a grad student at MIT, had.  Her solution is Clocky, a robotic alarm clock on wheels. 

While the shag-carpeted, thickly-padded Clocky starts on the bedside table, after the snooze button is hit, it rolls onto the floor and around the room, randomly finding someplace to settle.  Thus, when the alarm goes off the next time, the sleeper will have to get up and find it.

Naturally, the act of finding Clocky is just as waking, if not more so, than the alarm itself.  That's the whole point.  Nanda writes on her Clocky web page:

I've known people who put the alarm clock in the living room, but then forget to set it before going to sleep. Others say they are trying to wean themselves off of snoozing, as if it was a bad habit like smoking or drinking. In the foggy logic of our drowsiness, we disable the very device that is meant to wake us up. Having the alarm clock hide from me was just the most obvious way I could think of to get out of bed.

Nanda mentions that she was inspired in part by her kittens waking her in the morning by biting her toes.  Having myself been woken by a surly, nose-biting cat, I can vouch that a small, furry entity yowling from a hidden location makes one alert quickly.  And Clocky doesn't need to be fed, an advantage that many furry entities lack.

Clocky "is supposed to remind you of a troubled pet that you love anyway," Nanda told the Boston Globe.  And her troubled pet is drawing a lot of interest: Clocky is "one of the most-talked about Media Lab inventions in years," according to the Globe, and Nanda's scheduled to appear on "Good Morning America" next week to demonstrate it.

She's got even bigger plans for the next version of Clocky: tag-team alarm clocks.

Let's say there are two people with different sleep schedules sharing a room. Maybe one person's Clocky can tell the other to hush up if it has sounded off one too many times. Or, maybe they can form an alliance and simultaneously target the offending over-sleeper. I have adopted the philosophy that when two devices communicate, they can solve more problems—that is, two Clockies are better than one.

You won't be buying a Clocky any time soon though.  As her page notes, Clocky "is not commercially available at this time."  While she's planning to market Clocky in the future, she told the Globe that Christmas may be too soon for it to hit the shelves.  "I'd project maybe in a year," she said.

So it looks like some of us will be tapping snooze buttons until then.