We’ve got some historical past, iRobot and I, or a minimum of Roomba, the primary consumer-grade, commercially viable robotic vacuum, and I do. So once I learn the information that iRobot was so cash-strapped it may need to stop operations, a wave a unhappiness washed over me.
Maybe this sense was intensified as a result of the information arrived as I used to be ending Joseph L. Jones’ new e-book Dancing with Roomba. Jones, one among iRobot’s earliest staff and an unique engineer behind Roomba (an MIT Scientist, the robotic vacuum was mainly Jones’ and a colleague’s concept).
Starting at the beginning
23 years ago, I was working at PC Magazine when I began speaking to a trio of scientists at MIT’s Media Lab: Rodney Brooks, Helen Greiner, and Colin Angle. While I do not remember the particulars, I believe it was my long-time fascination with robots that led me to them and their still-young company, iRobot. Brooks, in particular, was a genius who figured out that a behavior-based approach to robot programming might lead to long-term success. The team built iRobot (though it was then called IS Robotics), and Jones soon joined.
By the time I met them, iRobot already had one spectacular failure under its belt: My Real Baby (made in partnership with Hasbro). It was costly ($98) and possibly a little bit too bizarre, maybe customers’ first encounter with the uncanny valley.
iRobot shortly pivoted towards most effort on the robotic vacuum venture, which might then eat the subsequent two years of its formative years. The corporate’s different enterprise, the place Greiner targeted a lot of her time, was on navy robots like Packbot, which could possibly be thrown over partitions, by means of home windows, and into tunnels to do robust and soiled jobs that may in any other case hurt soft-tissue people.
Jones’ e-book is stuffed with nitty-gritty particulars of robotic vacuum growth. Studying it, I typically felt as if I used to be sitting within the engineering, design, and growth workshop as Jones and his colleagues labored out some actually troublesome however, for the typical, analog vacuum, prosaic issues.
I used to be fascinated to study, for example, that for a lot of its growth, the Roomba did not also have a vacuum; it was an clever ground sweeper. iRobot CEO Colin Angle insisted on the addition of a low-grade vacuum and that it might be the very first thing to energy up whenever you turned on Roomba.
It worked and we could afford it
By the time I saw the first Roomba in late 2002, it was fully formed; a roughly 3-inch-tall disc with a pronounced gray bumper and oddball way of cleaning an entire floor or rug. Jones goes on at length about how the team worked out the cleaning process and the challenges faced by a robot that only knows its job (cleaning) but not its location. Sensor technology was in its infancy when Roomba started out. Now there are cameras and sensors that can map not just a room but an entire house.
I remember shooting a local TV segment with a Roomba running noisily on the table behind me. The fact that it never plummeted off the edge was another accomplishment that Jones wrote took not just wheels that could, depending on elevation, detect when they were no longer touching the ground, but also additional backup sensors to read voltage changes. In other words, the first-gen little robot was even built with redundancies.
And did I mention that it cost just $199? Jones writes about all the effort iRobot put into keeping the number of components and motors low to manage costs. It was something robot vacuum competitor Electrolux, which beat Roomba to market with the Trilobite, apparently didn’t consider when pricing its consumer vac at an eye-watering $1,500.
Roomba wasn’t just interesting and new; it was effective. I remember marveling as it swept up Cheerios on my office floor and being even more shocked when I first slid out the small dust bin to find it stuffed with debris.
iRobot went on to sell tens of millions of Roombas, with many eventually costing well in excess of $500. But the company also spawned countless competitors and imitators, some of which iRobot purchased, like Evolution Robotics (which developed a great location system).
Some companies sold cheaper robots that appeared to do the same thing as Roomba, and eventually, the innovator was simply part of the robot vacuum pack.
In recent years, the company has struggled to compete and stand out. When we were dazzled at CES 2025 by a robotic vacuum that got here with a retractable arm for picking up and moving obstacles, iRobot was nowhere in sight. As an alternative, robotic vacuum innovator Roborock is now the one taking the large cleansing automation swings.
Maybe iRobot’s final likelihood to return to its former glory was the potential acquisition by Amazon, however that was scuttled a couple of years ago. Quickly, CEO Colin Angle was out.
Can’t clean up this mess
Now, the company reported in a recent US Securities and Exchange Commission filing explaining the dangers of not getting a mortgage waiver extension: “If this waiver shouldn’t be prolonged on the finish of the relevant interval, we will likely be in default. Our monetary situation continues to say no, and we could also be unable to safe the extra funding wanted to proceed our operations.”
I do not know what is going to occur with iRobot, however I feel it is value contemplating that its potential demise represents extra than simply one other over-extended tech firm going beneath.
Our embrace of automated cleansing, from robotic vacuums and mops, to potential humanoid home robots is, in giant measure, due to the efforts and dangers of a small band of scientists, technologists, and engineers. Folks like Joseph L. Jones, who started dreaming of robotic vacuum years earlier than the primary shopper imagined a pizza formed bot doing the soiled work for them. It took, as Jones notes in his e-book, the fitting ideas, folks, luck, and, for a time, an absence of competitors.
Roomba grew to become a part of our tradition (right here it’s parodied on SNL) and continues to be a part of the lives of hundreds of thousands of customers, nevertheless it’s not the robotic vacuum monolith it as soon as was. The enterprise fractured into a large number of selections and costs, and the competitors caught up and ultimately surpassed it.
So increase a glass to iRobot and your Roomba. Its brightest days could also be behind it, however a minimum of it left a clear path in its path.
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