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Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

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Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#71

Post by tguvot »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #60
tguvot wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i got roomba less than year ago, because it was hard to find well reviewed non-mop vacuum with docking station that sucks all the dirt out.

> non-mop vacuum Such a good point. Vacuum wars website has no way to filter out vacuums without mop (my house is mostly carpet, I do want a good product but they are all with mops nowadays). It's such a common issue with sites like this. It's either all products or products WITH this feature. No way to find products WITHOUT this feature. Anyway quite happy with my Mova which is a rebranded Dreame.

my house is actually mostly tiles/hardwood (at least areas that are accessible for roomba). but i want it just to be vacuumed.

polished tiles will always have some water marks after washing and require pass with floor buffer to buff it out. i also don't want to deal with with clean/dirty water (yeah, i know that are now few models that you can hookup to drain/water supply. but it's not exactly trivial to arrange in convenient way).

what i really want, is dock integrated with central vacuum.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#72

Post by Animats »

sudosysgen wrote: post #69
Animats wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neato, which had a robot vacuum with LIDAR, shut down in 2023. That's not the key problem. Binocular vision ought to be good enough for a vacuum. It's short range compared to the inter-camera distance. Vehicle object ranging at distance is much tougher and can be fooled.

> Binocular vision ought to be good enough for a vacuum. It could be, but it just is not. VSLAM robots were practically significant worse. There are a lot of limitations to multi-ocular vision for a robot vacuum, for example the relatively featureless walls and few features across the horizontal binocular axis. Neato was never as big as iRobot. They didn't fail from commanding heights, they never were that successful…

> relatively featureless walls

Right. The cheap solution to that is projecting a pattern of IR dots on the walls to give them some features. One version of Microsoft's Kinect did that.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#73

Post by avian »

willis936 wrote: post #33
kingstnap wrote: post #18

I wonder what happens to the app and cloud functionality. > Under the restructuring, vacuum cleaner maker Shenzhen PICEA will receive the entire equity stake in the reorganized company. The company’s common stock will be wiped out under the proposed Chapter 11 plan. Hopefully they keep the lights on.

I had a roomba i5 fully stop working earlier this year. It said it couldn't connect to the internet but I believe what it meant was "some aspect of the remote server has decayed to the point that it no longer works with this platform". I threw it in the trash, vowed to never let this happen again, and got a valetudo machine. I think the lights have been off for some time already.

This is surprising to me because not long ago I bought a Roomba i5 specifically because it was one of the few robot vacuums that could still work fully off-line (in the "just vacuum everything reachable" mode, but I don't need anything else).

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#74

Post by jgilias »

tguvot wrote: post #71
dzhiurgis wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> non-mop vacuum Such a good point. Vacuum wars website has no way to filter out vacuums without mop (my house is mostly carpet, I do want a good product but they are all with mops nowadays). It's such a common issue with sites like this. It's either all products or products WITH this feature. No way to find products WITHOUT this feature. Anyway quite happy with my Mova which is a rebranded Dreame.

my house is actually mostly tiles/hardwood (at least areas that are accessible for roomba). but i want it just to be vacuumed. polished tiles will always have some water marks after washing and require pass with floor buffer to buff it out. i also don't want to deal with with clean/dirty water (yeah, i know that are now few models that you can hookup to drain/water supply. but it's not exactly trivial to arrange in c…

I have a pretty old Roborock, and I can just not attach the mop and have it in vacuum only mode.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#75

Post by darkwater »

nobodyandproud wrote: post #21
temp0826 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty crazy just how much better the Neatos were than brand new ones. I wonder if that (German?) company has tried to sell the IP? RIP...

Vorwerk group. No idea, but it’s pointless imho. Roborock and Eufy (and other competitors) clearly either stole or reverse-engineered the tech. If the IP had enough value then I’m sure Vorwerk would’ve pursued it in court. But here we are.

Vorwerk makes really good hardware and home appliances. Its only negative part is the almost pyramidal sales style. It's not really pyramidal as in the scam, because you actually buy something and you don't need to become a seller, but it uses "regular housewives" [1] as sellers.

[1] at least 30 years ago, now many of them do also another paid work (not Vorwerk-related) on top of unpaid house chores.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#76

Post by whatsupdog »

olivierlacan wrote: post #34

If you've used any non-iRobot vacuum alternatives in the last 5 years and ever owned a Roomba in the past there should be nothing surprising about this headline. It's shocking to me how good Roborock mop-vacuums are for example, Eufy vacuums are nice as well. They still run into unavoidable issues, but they're: much quieter even at their highest setting; show you how they map out the space; allow you to easily custom…

I second your option about Roborock. Also Dreame. Although I use both of them after rooting with Valetudo and connecting to my home assistant.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#77

Post by schainks »

jayd16 wrote: post #29
anonu wrote: post #22

will be replaced by humanoid robots soon

You gotta love the idea of a humanoid robot, shuffling around and bumping into everything to navigate while wiping up a bit.

Reminds me of this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krcNIWPkNzA

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#78

Post by aschobel »

lazide wrote: post #28
krackers wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just marketing, iRobot basically stopped innovating. For commodity items like robot vacuums or pool cleaners, there is a relentless pressure to innovate. You can't simply coast or else you will soon find yourself left behind. This is a good article to describe the viewpoint of Chinese iRobot competitor https://kr-asia.com/at-usd-90-per-unit-seauto-is-quietly-swe...

I haven't seen a useful innovation in a robovacuum for at least a decade. What are you talking about? Biggest issue has been the flood of cheap chinese units on the market - like GoPro, they had nowhere to go, and got beat on price once feature parity was achieved (which didn't take that long).

The roller mop vacuum are getting incredibly good; that is in the last year also.

Just got a Mova z60, it's shocking how much progress has been made even in the last 5 years compared to my old lidar Roborock. The z60 can even hurdle over small barriers.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#80

Post by jader201 »

tguvot wrote: post #38
olivierlacan wrote: post #34

If you've used any non-iRobot vacuum alternatives in the last 5 years and ever owned a Roomba in the past there should be nothing surprising about this headline. It's shocking to me how good Roborock mop-vacuums are for example, Eufy vacuums are nice as well. They still run into unavoidable issues, but they're: much quieter even at their highest setting; show you how they map out the space; allow you to easily custom…

i got roomba less than year ago, because it was hard to find well reviewed non-mop vacuum with docking station that sucks all the dirt out.

The common solution is to just buy the cheapest Roborock that does a great job at vacuuming, even if it has a mop (that you never have to use).

I got a Q7 M5+ for this exact reason, for $265 shipped. (And yes, that includes a self-emptying bin.)

For the vacuum function, it seemed to be highly rated.

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