Roomba

History

MIT roboticists Colin Angle, Helen Greiner, and Rodney Brooks cofounded IS Robotics, which later became iRobot, in 1990. The following year, another MIT engineer, Joe Jones, became iRobot's first full-time hire, and began pursuing the idea of an autonomous cleaning robot, a project he'd been exploring even before joining the company. Despite difficulties in obtaining funding, Jones built several prototypes of what would eventually become the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner.

In September 2002, the company introduced the first Roomba model. Less than three years later, iRobot was selling a million units a year. Early models were known for zigzagging randomly to achieve full room coverage. Later models feature a new visual simultaneous localization and mapping (vSLAM) navigation system, allowing it to clean more efficiently. As of 2022, there have been ten generations of Roomba models.

In 2010, Roomba was inducted into Carnegie Mellon University's Robots Hall of Fame, with an entry that read, in part: "A humble, disk-shaped machine, the Roomba doesn't have a personality or a face, doesn't dazzle with speed or bright lights. It just sucks up dirt and dust from carpets and rugs. Critics said it wasn't a very good vacuum cleaner. But it was good enough for lots of people who didn't care to spend their time vacuuming their homes. […] In the process, a whole new category of robot—the domestic consumer robot—was created."

iRobot has reportedly sold 40 million Roomba units over the past two decades. In August 2022, Amazon announced its intention to acquire iRobot for US $1.7 billion.