GoKawiilis 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.
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The original robot vacuum company showed off a concept robot at the IFA tech show in Berlin today. The Roomba Duo combines a heavy-duty floor-washing machine with a smaller, slimmer Roomba. The two floor cleaners can move around your home together, with the main unit mopping and sweeping larger floor areas and the smaller unit lowering mechanically when needed to clean tighter spaces, such as under tables or in corners.
The Roomba Duo is a floor washer that carries a smaller robot vacuum with it. The Roomba Plus 757 lives on top. You can see part of the floor washing mechanism here, iRobot didn’t show the underside of the robot. The robot’s navigation systems are at the top, giving it a sort of face.
The Duo is also an autonomous mobile dock, with clean and dirty water tanks and a dust bag on board, and it uses lidar and camera-based navigation to map your home, navigate, detect obstacles, and look for dirt.
The main vacuum is the most powerful iRobot has made, according to iRobot’s Adam Pope, and is more comparable capability-wise to an upright vacuum. It can also steam-mop with a large roller mop using 46 newtons of downward pressure. The Duo can also clean up solid messes — I watched a demo where it sucked up pasta from a carpet, and proceeded to wash the carpet. Pope said it’s the most powerful vacuum the company has made. (We have a video coming, check back soon!)
The smaller unit is the Roomba Plus 757, which sits on top and is deployed by a mechanical arm that lowers it to clean spaces the main unit can’t reach.
iRobot’s new CEO, Hao Li. The Duo spitting out the smaller Roomba.
iRobot’s new CEO, Hao Li, presented the Duo, saying the innovation proved, “The future of floor care has a familiar name.” Hao Li is from iRobot’s parent company, Picea, which purchased iRobot out of bankruptcy earlier this year.
The Roomba Duo is certainly a new approach for a consumer home robot. However, it resembles the commercial cleaning bots you might see in hotels or malls (minus the extra robot on top), and doesn’t feel like a good fit for a home. But if you already have a robot vacuum, a stick vac, a carpet cleaner, and a floor washing device, the Duo would combine everything into one.
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