is a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
For many, iRobot’s Roomba robot vacuum was their first experience with a home robot. When I got my Roomba in 2005, I felt like I was a step closer to my dream of living in a Jetsons-style home where a robot did my chores for me. It was expensive, around $300 for a small black disc on wheels that sucked up dirt, but its promise to do one of my most-hated chores while I was at work was compelling. The reality back then was that I spent more time babysitting it than it did actually cleaning my floors, but it was an exciting glimpse into the future of today’s excellent robot vacuums.
I wasn’t alone in my excitement. Robot vacuums quickly became a popular household product, and today most people refer to their floor-cleaning bots as Roombas, even if the vacuum picking up crumbs and pet hair was made by Ecovacs or Roborock. But despite its enduring popularity, the company behind Roomba filed for bankruptcy this week and will hand over control of its business to its Chinese manufacturing partner, Picea Robotics.
iRobot says it’s business as usual for the millions of Roombas in people’s homes, which will continue to function as expected — for now. But how did the most popular household robot company in the world fall so far and fall so spectacularly?
If you ask former CEO and iRobot cofounder Colin Angle, who stepped down in January 2024, the answer is simple: Government regulation killed iRobot. “It’s a blow for robotics and a tragic day for American innovation,” he said in an interview with The Verge. “This was our freaking market — we invented consumer robotics. We built this thing, we put it in a box, wrapped it up, and handed it to someone else. We did this to ourselves; this was a choiceful action that was not based on the merit and charge of antitrust.”
The “we” he’s referring to is the US government and, in turn, the European regulators who moved to block Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot in 2023 as they sought to rein in Big Tech. Others feel that iRobot failed to innovate, riding on its early success and fending off competition with its patent portfolio until it couldn’t. In reality, the answer lies somewhere in between, in a space where the vision for the future of the smart home meets the reality of what people actually need and want in their homes.
From the lab to your living room
iRobot was founded in 1990 by MIT roboticists, including Angle, Helen Greiner, and Rodney Brooks, as an AI company building a robotics platform. “It’s eerily congruent to certain platforms companies out there today,” says Angle. “We learned the hard way that it’s not until you can use that toolkit to create something that people want that there’s any value to it.”
While the idea of building a robot that could clean your home was always a goal, it wasn’t a possibility in the early days. “The promise of robotics was always Rosie from The Jetsons; the question was when this was going to happen,” says Angle. The team honed their expertise in partnerships with the government, which funded robots for space exploration (working on NASA’s Mars Sojourner Rover), mine detection, bomb disposal, search and rescue (its PackBot was used in 9/11 recovery efforts), and other military applications. Basically, it developed robots to go where humans shouldn’t or can’t.
“It’s a tragic day for American innovation. This was our freaking market — we invented consumer robotics.
... continue reading