iRobot Is in Trouble, but Roomba Is Already Dead

In hindsight, though, iRobot’s bet on camera-based navigation was the wrong move. Its robots not only failed to keep up with the new norms set by a stiff wave of competition from China but also seemed to get worse as the company tried to brute-force better performance out of a flawed platform, rather than pivot to a more suitable technology or at least refine what it was already good at.

Right around the time that iRobot launched the Roomba i7+, some strident Wirecutter readers goaded me into testing the lidar-based Xiaomi Mi robot.

At the time, the Mi wasn’t sold in the US. We had to buy it through a gray-market seller, and everything — the instructions, the app, even the robot’s voice — was in Mandarin. I was also skeptical of the lidar-based nav system, which relied on beams of light to map out walls and obstacles. Neato and other companies had been trying to make lidar work for a decade at that point, with disappointing results.

But within 10 minutes of testing, it was obvious that the Mi was the fastest, most accurate robot I’d ever seen. The Xiaomi Mi was made by the company that would later become known as Roborock, which has since become a leader in robot vacuums.

Roborock soon followed the Mi with new models for the US. By the end of 2019, Wirecutter made the Roborock S4 a pick, and we’ve recommended at least one Roborock model in our guide to the best robot vacuums ever since.

Hundreds of copycats soon followed in Roborock’s footsteps, all using essentially the same navigation system. Even the cheapest bots from brands such as Tesvor and Wyze zipped around with the same precision as the flagship models from newly crowned top-tier companies such as Roborock, Dreame, and Ecovacs.

People who owned lidar bots, even cheap ones, tended to be much happier with their experiences than Roomba owners, mostly because of the speedy, accurate navigation. In 2021, we ran an AI analysis on thousands of buyer ratings for about a dozen popular robots and found a stark contrast: For every lidar robot, the navigation system was one of the main reasons people said they liked their robovac. For each Roomba model, feelings about navigation tended to be neutral or negative.

Any time iRobot tried to fix one of the problems with its camera-based navigation, it seemed to break something else. The last few models the company released on its legacy hardware platform got some of the worst reviews, often because the vacuums had trouble finding their way back to their increasingly bulky and feature-packed charging docks.

Ironically, in a 2019 interview on the Lex Fridman Podcast, iRobot’s Angle said that using both cameras and lidar could make sense in a navigation system, particularly in self-driving cars. But iRobot never tried it in a Roomba under his leadership.

It might not have been a purely philosophical decision. Way back in its bump-bot days, iRobot had committed to a modular hardware platform that made it easy for the company to experiment with major components — brushes, transmissions, motors, bins, filters, sensors, battery packs — without having to overhaul the chassis for every new robot.

For owners, it also made the bots easy to repair with just a screwdriver, a benefit that had a lot to do with why we kept recommending some Roombas even after it was clear that most people wanted bots like Roborock’s models. Even now, iRobot still stocks spare parts on its website for models that are more than a decade old.

However, that hardware platform became a liability as time went on. Flavia Pastore, a product engineer who has been at iRobot since 2009, told me recently that it was difficult to make major changes to the navigation system and other components, even when it was becoming obvious that improvements were necessary. And it kept the company’s production costs high.

Newer brands began to blow past iRobot in nearly every meaningful way: more features, better reviews, lower prices. Roborock, Dreame, Ecovacs, and others pushed the boundaries at the top of the market, producing popular mop-vacuum combos complete with self-cleaning docks, as well as advanced nav systems that used both lidar and cameras.

iRobot also lost its foothold at the bottom of the market. In 2021, Angle told me that the Roomba 600 Series — the old entry-level bump-around bot — still accounted for 60% of iRobot’s revenue, even after it had moved toward camera-based navigation. But that was also the point at which cheap and decent lidar-based bots started to flood the zone, and buying a bump bot stopped making much sense.

By 2023, Roomba had discontinued several of the midmarket models that we still liked, and Wirecutter stopped recommending Roomba robots altogether.