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Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

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Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#61

Post by dzhiurgis »

Izkata wrote: post #35
lazide wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Emptying into the dock instead of having to empty the robot's dustbin weekly and almost everything involving mopping in combined units is within that time range. Lidar mapping was also pretty rare a decade ago, Neato was the first and it took a while before others did it too, then there was apps for controlling no-go zones using those maps instead of variations of virtual walls, if they had anything like that at all.…

There are ones that integrate into your furniture, a bit like a dishwasher - plumbing included.

Robot arms are obvious next step. Tidying up kids toys would be god sent, but unless speed improves my kids will DDOS it in seconds.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#62

Post by syntaxing »

Not too surprising. iRobot was all into SIFT for 15 years before the patent expired in 2020. Meanwhile, Chinese robot vacuums reverse engineered/stole/copy Neato's XV-11 lidar and made it better over the span of a decade (RIP Neato). iRobot joined the lidar party recently but it was too little too late. Product was too expensive and their brand was soured by the poor VSLAM performance. I had one of their mopping robots during the pandemic and you had to keep the lights on to mop. It would often get really lost if it went under a table. I got rid of it and replaced it with a roborock shortly after.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#63

Post by dzhiurgis »

CrossVR wrote: post #27
sudosysgen wrote: post #20

iRobot's failure is that they made a bet to use CV instead of Lidar for their mapping robots for a long time until it was too late. That made their affordable, non-mapping robots far far worse than only slightly higher priced lidar robots, while their mapping robots were too expensive for mass appeal and were still worse at navigation than up-market lidar based robots. Ultimately they were simply outcompeted.

Reminds me of a certain self-driving car company.

Is it one with P/E > 300?

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#64

Post by krackers »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #61
Izkata wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emptying into the dock instead of having to empty the robot's dustbin weekly and almost everything involving mopping in combined units is within that time range. Lidar mapping was also pretty rare a decade ago, Neato was the first and it took a while before others did it too, then there was apps for controlling no-go zones using those maps instead of variations of virtual walls, if they had anything like that at all.…

There are ones that integrate into your furniture, a bit like a dishwasher - plumbing included. Robot arms are obvious next step. Tidying up kids toys would be god sent, but unless speed improves my kids will DDOS it in seconds.

Roborock has a model with robot arms. Quite pricy at the moment though.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#65

Post by ghaff »

maxglute wrote: post #59
ghaff wrote: post #41

My brother has a house that is pretty much custom-made for a robo-vacuum. One level, no transitions, they have pets. And they like it well enough (not an iRobot)--and it still gets tangled up in stuff from time to time. I have a 2-level house. Even after some house work, one room that probably still has too high a transition. A lot of different surfaces (And I'm not religious with cords and the like.) I'm guessing th…

Depends on your tolerance for filth (not a value judgement). You don't know how messy your enviroment is untih you see a robovac fill cannisters of shit each week. Having baseline for cleaniness helps with allergies. Like everything you can optmize for some big QoL gains, i.e. i basically just whip crumbs from surfaces straight to the floor knowing it'll get picked up. The solution for 2 level homes is 2 robovacs, ch…

Probably fair. I have a pretty high tolerance for both a level of floor droppings and clutter until I pull out my broom vac every week or two. And I do have a housekeeper every 3-4 weeks to do a deeper cleaning--a lot of which wouldn't be handled by a robovac.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#66

Post by syntaxing »

tzs wrote: post #57

People are mentioning alternatives, but do any of them have the repairability of a Roomba? The maker was famous for keeping parts readily available for even the oldest models, and making it so replacing parts was easy (although I've heard that in mid-2024 they started on some model making wheels, chassis, and motors an integrated unit that the user cannot easily service). If you were happy with your Roomba you could…

Thanks to the full Chinese supply chain, you can replace every single part of the roborock. Even if Roborock doesn’t sell it directly, someone does. I’ve owned a couple and I haven’t had any main board die. But you can buy anything from the wheels, to main board, to lidar online.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#67

Post by dzhiurgis »

krackers wrote: post #64
dzhiurgis wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are ones that integrate into your furniture, a bit like a dishwasher - plumbing included. Robot arms are obvious next step. Tidying up kids toys would be god sent, but unless speed improves my kids will DDOS it in seconds.

Roborock has a model with robot arms. Quite pricy at the moment though.

Poor reviews so far. Needs iteration or two to perfect it.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#68

Post by sudosysgen »

nobodyandproud wrote: post #49
sudosysgen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is not much tech to steal here. 2D lidar mapping is something a high schooler could do 10+ years ago, and that was their core tech. The value was in executing earlier and better, and applying existing tech to robovacuums. If they could have sued they likely would, this is a valuable market.

It’s not just mapping. Also, I recall Neato was often purchased and cannibalized by researchers for its lidar. This was all cutting edge 10+ years ago. Even today, the features it supported offline then is just matched at best today in 2025/2026. Not exceeded; and often crippled when offline.

There is not that much more to it than lidar and 2D slam as far as the core technology. There are a lot more features yes but they are not nearly as valuable. I agree they are better, but that's for reason of execution and non-enshitiffication, not core tech.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#69

Post by sudosysgen »

Animats wrote: post #53
sudosysgen wrote: post #20

iRobot's failure is that they made a bet to use CV instead of Lidar for their mapping robots for a long time until it was too late. That made their affordable, non-mapping robots far far worse than only slightly higher priced lidar robots, while their mapping robots were too expensive for mass appeal and were still worse at navigation than up-market lidar based robots. Ultimately they were simply outcompeted.

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 to begin with, for entirely different reasons. If they had managed to get to iRobot's level of ubiquity and distribution they would have had a much better shot of still being around nowadays.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#70

Post by sudosysgen »

syntaxing wrote: post #62

Not too surprising. iRobot was all into SIFT for 15 years before the patent expired in 2020. Meanwhile, Chinese robot vacuums reverse engineered/stole/copy Neato's XV-11 lidar and made it better over the span of a decade (RIP Neato). iRobot joined the lidar party recently but it was too little too late. Product was too expensive and their brand was soured by the poor VSLAM performance. I had one of their mopping robo…

As far as I can tell cheapish 2D lidar for mapping and robot navigation were a bit earlier than the XV-11; they were made by Hokuyo in 2006. I remember that their lidar module was made by some other (American?) company that in turn competed with Hokuyo, people would take them out and use for their own projects.

It's ultimately not very complicated - it's a laser rangefinder that you spin on a motor. It's such a simple - and old! - technology which would obviously get significantly cheaper with time, it was definitely the right horse to bet on. I never understood iRobot's vision strategy.

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