Things continue to look bleak for the original robot vacuum maker. iRobot’s third-quarter results, released last week, show that revenue is down and “well below our internal expectations due to continuing market headwinds, ongoing production delays, and unforeseen shipping disruptions,” said Gary Cohen, iRobot CEO, in a press release.
This meant they had to spend more cash and are now down to under $25 million. “At this time, the Company has no sources upon which it can draw for additional capital,” said Cohen.
The Roomba manufacturer has been struggling for several years in the face of increased competition from Chinese manufacturers. A sale to Amazon in 2022 looked to be its lifeline; however, regulatory scrutiny scuppered the deal, and the company was left in further turmoil. It laid off over 30 percent of its staff, lost its founder and CEO, Colin Angle, and was left with substantial debt as a result of the fallout.
This year, iRobot launched an entirely new line of robot vacuums, ostensibly to better compete with companies like Roborock, Ecovacs, and Dreame, adding lidar navigation to its line for the first time (over VSLAM). The new models look significantly different from the original Roombas and more like their competitors. They also use a different app with fewer features, but added some new hardware features the previous models lacked, including spinning mop pads and a roller mop.
In a regulatory filing earlier this month, the company warned it may be forced to seek bankruptcy protection following the breakdown of advanced negotiations with a potential buyer, and if it couldn’t secure additional funding.
Roomba customers are understandably concerned about the impact these current financial troubles might have on their home cleaning robots.
Earlier this month, fellow American robot vacuum manufacturer Neato, which shut down in 2023, pulled the plug on its cloud services, leaving its robots unable to communicate with the Neato app. However, the vacuums can still be controlled manually.
Similarly, if iRobot goes out of business and its cloud shuts down, most Roombas should still continue to work in offline mode — pressing the physical button on the robot to start, stop, and dock it. However, they likely wouldn’t be controllable via the app for features like scheduling or specific room cleaning, or via voice commands. This potential dilemma just further highlights that cloud-connected devices should be enhanced by connectivity, not reliant on it.
Oh look, another example of a product that worked fine without internet connectivity and was improved by adding extra bullshit you don’t actually need that then gets worse when those features can’t function properly because their server is offline.
We got a basic roomba 650 (the one that crashes into stuff and randomly cleans) like 10 years ago and it still works fine (well, as well as it ever worked which wasn’t great), you program the time and day of the week with physical buttons, and leave it alone.
Yeah. I’ve got an 870 that’s still cleaning. It gets stuck under furniture and needs to be rescued at least once a week, and last week it lost its
assdustbin somehow mid clean, but it’s still kicking.Lmao
I would watch this screen version of The Brave Little Toaster 2.
I printed special little stilts to raise one of our tables the 10mm extra it needed to be able to go under without getting wedged. It still tries fornicating with the cat tree - a different problem to solve.
Never lost it’s ass though, one to look out for there.
Would you like to see the picture of how I found it?
Why not. I would love to see your detached robotic ass.
Well it’s exactly what I asked for, can’t argue 😂
We settled on Puck for the name. It rhymes with what’s said when weird noises come from its direction…
So instead of a janitor you become a robot technician. No thanks.
A fair assesment. Except that you have to (and should be) cleaning the upright vacuum as well. Vacuum fires are no joke.
My vacuum doesn’t get lost under the furniture.
Your vacuum doesn’t go under furniture more than likely so to clean under there you quit being a janitor to become a furniture mover?
I guess it’s turtles all the way down.
The cat crawling under there dust mops regularly.
Probably.
How did they squander being the name in autonomous vacuum devices…? It’s kinda baffling tbh.
Well, Chinese manufactures cloned the design and came in well under price, took the Chinese market, then improved the product and challenged iRobot globally.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
I would not say they cloned the design. The first breakthrough for Roborock was the S5, which had LiDAR and a map. Both was not something iRobot had at the time. iRobot simply chose to not innovate in the areas people wanted first. People didn’t like the random cleaning that the roombas did for a long time compared to the structured of almost everybody else.
I used to work at iRobot. Chinese manufacturers cloned Roomba so well that parts from their robot like wheels assemblies could be dropped in and the Roomba would work.
The issue is that iRobot decided not to litigate patent infringement in China because it’s an uphill battle.
I agree that iRobot was very slow to innovate. They were on the brink of releasing a lawn mower robot but covid hit and the C suites made the decision to kill that product and fire that team to reduce risk…
I was working with the education division about a decade and a bit ago when they had an open source platform with sensors and motors. Then iRobot abruptly killed that division too, right as our project was getting going.
I haven’t felt good about that company since.
The saddest news is that they are down to like 4 mechanical engineers. There were at least 30 when I was working there.
I was told all the engineering actually gets done by the contractors in China. The engineers just send a wish list and the China team hacks it together.
iRobot not going to make it. 4 engineers can’t innovate just like that.
I mean if you just get super ninja 10x engineers, that’s like 40 engineers.
A big part of it is also that in the grand scheme of things, roombas are kind of gimmicky because they don’t really do the time consuming parts of cleaning, like moving furniture or dusting baseboards. The value proposition of paying more for different tiers of branded mediocrity just isn’t there.
How did they squander being the name in autonomous vacuum devices…?
Letting a picture of a customer using the bathroom leak onto Facebook cannot have helped.
Really? It’s not a mystery. China. For the past 5+ years they have had better and cheaper vacuums. Meanwhile innovation has been at a standstill with irobot for the past decade.
For anyone interested in owning their vacuum robot check out Valetudo
Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to support anything from iRobot. I’m hoping that there will be a jailbreak made available before they go bankrupt, but I doubt it.
Not supporting iRobot vacuums isn’t necessarily a bad thing, considering that at the price iRobot is asking for their vacuums, a lot of the other companies in the space offer much nicer models with more features.
Except, you know, for everyone that has an iRobot device that is going to lose connectivity soon.
Absolutely love Valetudo!
I’ve been eyeballing this, doesn’t seem too difficult for most compatible models either. Might be a little after Christmas project
Customers shouldn’t need to be concerned because the company going down should not brick your PHYSICAL PRODUCTS
And yet, here we are
I’ve got one, and it works well enough when offline.
If not, I could set up Home Assistant and self-host it.
It’s a shame, as Mozilla gave iRobot one of the better privacy ratings. That’s the only reason I allowed it in my house to begin with.
But, clearly, a Google Home or Amazon Alexa needs cloud connectivity to function. And short of Stop Killing Games regulations forcing companies to release software to keep purchases functional after server shutdowns, there’s going to be no alternative when they shut down the servers.
But where do we draw the line?
A smart fridge should obviously keep working without cloud connectivity, since cloud features aren’t relevant to its core functionality.
A
spywarehouse-scanning vacuum robot, on the other hand, that stores video of your entire house on web servers “to map your home” may not have the processing power to model the home based on itssurveillancevideo recordings. So, is it reasonable, then, that these break when servers go offline?Without any regulations, the answer is just “consumers can go fuck themselves”, which clearly isn’t a good answer.
He said Home Assistant not Google home.
You mean the person who posted 3 hours after me?
My lil neato bot from 2017/2018ish makes a perimeter map around my place each time it deploys, then makes back and forth sweeps. It’s got a built in weekly timer by the quarter hour to schedule sweeps. It beeps at me when its bin is full. Why do robot vacuums need the internet?
This potential dilemma just further highlights that cloud-connected devices should be enhanced by connectivity, not reliant on it.
This should be everyone’s takeaway.
The problem isn’t the company possibly going out of business, its the loss of online service nerfing the device that is the real issue.
We could have consumer protection laws that mandate when a service that a consumer product relies on is no longer being served by the company, they must release the source code as FOSS for the community to carry it on if they so chose. This could apply to video game servers as well as robot vacuums.
We could, if someone cared to put in the effort to make that happen.
It would be easy enough to force vendors to make the URL the device connects to, configurable and to publish the API the device is using. Two minuscule changes that can prolong the life of devices by decades.
To be fair, many roombas have a mini DIN connector somewhere, which opens up the possibility for external control - what I plan to do when mine stops working due to server shutdown. However, getting replacement parts will get more and more tricky as time goes by.
I just had to through out a mostly functional airfryer because the drawer rail disintegrated and the replacement part is no longer manufactured. The oldest one I could get was a “new” version with more plastic and a slightly bigger size, so it didn’t fit by about 5%.
It really should be illegal, there is no logical reason for 500 slightly different models and inoperability of basic functions (drawers, APIs, …) aside from malignant greed and planet destruction.
Gods, I fucking hate this so much. I’ve got a ninja blender that the lid seal is broken, and the lid alone is like 50-70% of the cost of a whole new unit. It’s ridiculous how impossible it is to find replacement parts for simple things anymore.
This is why I have a 3D printer. I make all kinds of seals, gaskets, o-rings, usually better than original.
How do you 3d print a rubber gasket/seal?
TPU works fairly well depending on the application.
I wouldn’t rely on it for high temperature (above 150C) or high pressure/vacuum applications, but for most household applications it’ll hold up fine.
You print molds and make it out of RTV.
Do you use a special filament for that?
That would make the husk of the company truly worthless, and I’m not sure private equity will allow that.
If it doesn’t work when the cloud is down, it’s not your thing. Don’t buy it. 8sleep is only the most recent example.
Not to support this cloud-only system, but I used to own an iR (several, actually) and they can clean the entire space, pause, and cancel/dock with physical buttons.
Though it loses a large chunk of its smarts without a connection. No floor plan retention, no room selection, no 1 pass/2 pass, no knowledge about no-go lines and zones, no adjustable suction based on room…
But there’s no real reason for that. Losing the smarts. It’s just artificial to achieve lower bom.
Really? It can’t do no-go zones and lines without the cloud? Even the „Chinese competition“ can do that without internet.
Afaik there is extremely limited storage on these bots, so the floor plan is stored server-side. No cloud, no server, no no-go capabilities.
Given how cheap flash storage has been for years, this is an intentional design choice. They wanted it to be server side only, likely for data collection purposes.
If only we had things like 1tb storage in a tiny chip
I hope one day we could develop something like this
Line no go up if consumer has autonomy and awareness. Quick, marketing drones, put up more information about our amazing and very complex and totally unique super mega ultra cloud!
✨ profits ✨
The rommbas? Maybe. The other ones? They have plenty storage.
I bought a robot vacuum, rooted it, and installed Valetudo (Wyze WVCR200S w/motherboard from a Viomi V6 - same robot).
I don’t have to worry about this shit anymore. The vacuum still does the vacuum thing whether or not it’s connected to the internet.
How difficult was this to do?
I had to replace the motherboard with one from a different variant (same base robot) that could be rooted. Outside of that - super easy.
Is this a COA for irobot Roombas?
What?
Happy cake day. I was asking, before I dive into the hunt, if you saw any docs for doing the same sort of firmware update / swap for plain old irobot vacuums.
Idk how motivated to be to go do this. Just started reading about valetudo.
COA => course of action
Ahh. To my knowledge, iRobot units aren’t rootable, and are therefore unsupported by Valetudo.
https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html
My Wyze is based on an ODM unit, the 3irobotix CRL-200S. Companies like Wyze, Xiaomi, Viomi, iLife, Conga, and other brands customize and sell it as their own models since that’s cheaper than manufacturing their own units. Parts are swappable between them as they are all the same robot underneath… Kinda like how car companies rebrand models based on region. As far as I’m aware though, iRobot builds their own robots.
This is why IoT isn’t sustainable. If you don’t have total control you’re fucked.
Why proprietary cloud-based IoT isn’t sustainable.
Definitely. I use home assistant but I found a lot of things require enabling integrations with other platforms. They’re bricks if that platform decides they are.
The entire problem is that automobiles have become an accepted housing option, and Roombas don’t operate well in a vehicular environment, thus drastically cutting into their sale.
Truly the Kodak of this generation
Kodak said “we don’t believe digital photography will take over” and iRobot is like “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas”
They fucked up by making their robots last seemingly forever, due to the fact they spy on you and get stuck every 15 mins so you never want to turn them on.
I hope they open source it before dying (if they do end up going under)
You can’t set a timer on the thing without internet access?!?
You can’t do shit on those roombas without a connection to the manufacturers servers.
On and off is the most you can do.
In order to make them work again once the servers are down, you need to spoof the dns to a local server that you then need to reverse engineer from the api.
If you are lucky the thing has home assistant integration because some awesome people already did exactly that or the manufacturer was kind enough to give access to the bot api
Wow, what a piece of shit. Dumb engineers.
No fucking way this was decided by an engineer instead of a manager
Dumb shit like this is never the engineer’s idea.
I can guarantee you it wasn’t the engineers that wanted it this way
Not a single one of the robot vacuums that I’ve bought in the last 2 years seem to be able to function without internet access.
It’s asinine.
Also they break down so freaking fast. It’s not even funny. Even worse when the part that’s broken is non-replaceable and it’s like a $3 part.
Chinese robot cleaners are much better and cheaper than iRobot. No wonder iRobot is failing.
Sure, if you want China to have videos of you, your kids and your home. Roomba so far has the “best” privacy policy from all the companies. I am not saying its warranted, it never is with proprietary software/hardware, but Chinese companies are known for ignoring laws regarding privacy.
From a non US Perspective (most of the world) this is a non issue.
Because for the rest of the world the answer to this dilemma boils down to:
Do you want to be shook down by the big guy in the left corner with the can of coke in his hand or do you prefer to be fucked over by that big Asian guy in the right corner who’s slurping on his bubble tea?
I choose the one who demands the least.
Yeah… because the US hasn’t spied on anyone in recent history…
He did say “best”
I don’t trust the biggest guys on the market… I wouldn’t trust iRobot if Amazon did acquire it. But smaller companies do not have enough leverage on EU (I am from EU). They have to adhere, there are audits that must be made and I somehow trust more in audits and rule adherence on US side rather than the Chinese ones.
solution: get the cheapest one that doesn’t have a camera
Mine shan’t have a camera
still better than Americans when it comes to privacy. It is the lesser of the evils.
I am not fan of America, believe me, but US companies (apart from Zuck and a few others) still have more incentive to adhere to EU rules than the Chinese ones. Also the Chinese companies have to also adhere to Chinese govt rules, that have way more hidden agenda than the US ones (we will see what happens with the trumpette guy…)
but provides mechanisms for the companies or the courts to reject or challenge these if they believe the request violates the privacy rights of the foreign country the data is stored in
require American companies to seek clearance from European officials before complying with United States warrants seeking private data.
Again I am not saying US is ok, but for every 1 PRISM in US there is 100 in china.
The worst of China is still better than the best of America. America wrote the book on mass surveillance and privacy violations.
Time to DRM the trash out of them and spy on them, make money off subscriptions and selling the data to brokers who we trust to leak it to hackers again…
Didn’t they already try that? I figured that’s why Amazon wanted to buy them.
