We have some history, iRobot and I, or at least Roomba, the first commercially viable consumer-grade robot vacuum, and I do. So when I read the news that iRobot was so cash-strapped it might have to shut down, a wave of sadness washed over me.
Perhaps this feeling was heightened because the news came as I was finishing Joseph L. Jones’s new book Dance with Roomba. Jones, one of iRobot’s earliest employees and an original engineer behind the Roomba (an MIT Scientist, the robot vacuum was basically the brainchild of Jones and a colleague).
Starting from the beginning
23 years ago I worked at PC Magazine when I started talking to a trio of researchers at MIT’s Media Lab: Rodney Brooks, Helen Greiner, and Colin Angle. Although I don’t remember the details, I think it was my long-standing fascination with robots that led me to them and their still young company, iRobot. Brooks, in particular, was a genius who found that a behavior-based approach to robot programming could lead to long-term success. The team built iRobot (although it was then called IS Robotics), and Jones soon joined.
When I met them, iRobot already had a spectacular failure under its belt: My Real Baby (made in collaboration with Hasbro). It was expensive ($98) and perhaps a little too strange, perhaps consumers’ first encounter with the uncanny valley.
iRobot quickly pivoted toward maximum effort on the robot vacuum project, which would then consume the next two years of its early life. The company’s other business, where Greiner focused much of his time, was on military robots like the Packbot, which could be thrown over walls, through windows and into tunnels to perform hard and dirty tasks that might otherwise injure humans with soft tissue.
Jones’ book is full of fine details about the development of robotic vacuum cleaners. Reading it, I often felt like I was sitting in the engineering, design and development workshop as Jones and his colleagues worked on some really difficult, but for the average analog vacuum, prosaic problems.
I was intrigued to learn, for example, that the Roomba didn’t even have a vacuum for much of its development; it was an intelligent floor sweeper. iRobot CEO Colin Angle insisted on the addition of a low-end vacuum and that it would be the first thing to turn on when you turned on the Roomba.
It worked and we could afford it
When I saw the first Roomba in late 2002, it was fully formed; an approx. 3 inch high disc with a pronounced gray bumper and a strange way to clean an entire floor or carpet. Jones talks at length about how the team worked on 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. Now there are cameras and sensors that can map not just a room, but an entire house.
I remember filming a local TV spot with a Roomba running noisily on the table behind me. The fact that it never plummeted over the edge was another achievement, Jones wrote, taking not only wheels that, depending on height, could detect when they no longer touched the ground, but also extra backup sensors to read voltage changes. In other words, the first generation small robot was even built with redundancies.
And did I mention it was only $199? Jones writes about all the effort iRobot has put into keeping the number of components and motors low to control costs. That’s something robot vacuum rival Electrolux, which beat Roomba to market with the Trilobite, apparently didn’t consider when it priced its consumer vacuum at an eye-watering $1,500.
Roomba wasn’t just interesting and new; it was effective. I remember being amazed when it swept Cheerios onto my office floor, and I was even more shocked when I first slipped out of the little dust bin to find it full of dirt.
iRobot went on to sell tens of thousands of Roombas, many of which eventually cost well over $500. But the company also spawned countless competitors and imitators, some of which iRobot bought, like Evolution Robotics (which developed a fantastic localization system).
Some companies sold cheaper robots that appeared to do the same thing as the Roomba, and eventually the innovator was simply part of the robot vacuum package.
In recent years, the company has struggled to compete and stand out. When we were dazzled at CES 2025 by a robot vacuum that came with an extendable arm to pick up and move obstacles, iRobot was nowhere in sight. Instead, robotic vacuum cleaner innovator Roborock is now the one taking the big cleaning automation swings.
Perhaps iRobot’s last chance to return to its former glory was Amazon’s potential acquisition, but it was scrapped a few years ago. Soon CEO Colin Angle was out.
Can’t clean up this mess
Now, the company reported in a recent US Securities and Exchange Commission document explaining the risk of not getting a loan waiver extension: “If this waiver is not extended at the end of the applicable period, we will be in default. Our financial condition continues to decline and we may not be able to secure the additional financing necessary to continue our operations.”
I don’t know what will happen to iRobot, but I think it’s worth considering that its potential demise represents more than just another overextended tech company going under.
Our embrace of automated cleaning, from robotic vacuums and mops to potential humanoid home robots, is largely due to the efforts and risks of a small group of scientists, technologists and engineers. People like Joseph L. Jones, who started dreaming of robot vacuum cleaners years before the first consumer envisioned a pizza-shaped bot that did the dirty work for them. It required, as Jones notes in his book, the right principles, people, luck and, for a time, a lack of competition.
The Roomba became part of our culture (here it’s parodied on SNL ) and is still a part of millions of consumers’ lives, but it’s not the robotic vacuum monolith it once was. The business divided into a multitude of choices and prices, and the competition caught up and eventually surpassed it.
So raise a glass to iRobot and your Roomba. Its brightest days may be behind it, but at least it left a clean trail on its path.
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