We have some history, iRobot and I, or at least Roomba, the first consumer-grade, commercially viable robot vacuum, and I do. So when I read the news that iRobot was so cash-strapped it might have to cease operations, a wave a sadness washed over me.
Perhaps this feeling was intensified because the news arrived as I was finishing Joseph L. Jones’ new book Dancing with Roomba. Jones, one of iRobot’s earliest employees and an original engineer behind Roomba (an MIT Scientist, the robot vacuum was basically Jones’ and a colleague’s idea).
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 expensive ($98) and maybe a little too weird, 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 her time, was on military robots like Packbot, which could be thrown over walls, through windows, and into tunnels to do tough and dirty jobs that might otherwise harm soft-tissue humans.
Jones’ book is full of nitty-gritty details of robot vacuum development. Reading it, I often felt as if I was sitting in the engineering, design, and development workshop as Jones and his colleagues worked out some truly difficult but, for the average, analog vacuum, prosaic problems.
I was fascinated to learn, for instance, that for much of its development, the Roomba didn’t even have a vacuum; it was an intelligent floor sweeper. iRobot CEO Colin Angle insisted on the addition of a low-grade vacuum and that it would be the first thing to power up when 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 robot vacuum that came with a retractable arm for picking up and moving obstacles, iRobot was nowhere in sight. Instead, robot vacuum innovator Roborock is now the one taking the big cleaning automation swings.
Perhaps iRobot’s last chance to return to its former glory was the potential acquisition by Amazon, but that was scuttled a couple of 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 filing explaining the risks 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 be unable to secure the additional funding needed to continue our operations.”
I don’t know what will happen with iRobot, but I think it’s worth considering that its potential demise represents more than just another over-extended tech company going under.
Our embrace of automated cleaning, from robot vacuums and mops, to potential humanoid home robots is, in large measure, because of the efforts and risks of a small band of scientists, technologists, and engineers. People like Joseph L. Jones, who began dreaming of robot vacuum years before the first consumer imagined a pizza shaped bot doing the dirty work for them. It took, as Jones notes in his book, the right principles, people, luck, and, for a time, a lack of competition.
Roomba became part of our culture (here it is parodied on SNL) and is still part of the lives of millions of consumers, but it’s not the robotic vacuum monolith it once was. The business fractured 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 in its path.
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lance.ulanoff@futurenet.com (Lance Ulanoff)
