Amazon to acquire maker of Roomba vacuum for roughly $1.7B | Hacker News Reader

Amazon to acquire maker of Roomba vacuum for roughly $1.7B

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482 pointsmrkramer475 comments

Roomba / iRobot is years behind the Chinese companies. We just got an Ecovacs X1 Omni - a mopping vacuum bot with actual rotating mop scrubbers, AI vision obstacle avoidance, LIDAR mapping, and most importantly fully automated water fill & mop pad cleaning at the base station. We fill a clean water tank & empty the dirty one about once a week. Floors are spotless - huge difference from static cloth mopping bots.

Meanwhile, iRobot still hadn’t figured out how to make an effective stand-alone mop bot, much less an auto fill station or combined bot that actually works. Roborock and Ecovacs products launch in China 6-12 months before their US launch. By the time Roomba has a decent mop bot, the X2 or X3 will probably be out offering integration with home plumbing to avoid any manual intervention for months at a time.

EDIT: commenters are asking what works offline from Roborock / Ecovacs. For the self-cleaning-mop generation like the X1 Omni:

- Roborock obstacle avoidance is local, but works better with cloud.

- Roborock can be controlled by a local home automation server without internet access.

- Ecovacs obstacle avoidance requires cloud.

- Ecovacs control requires cloud.

I remembered these stats from a Youtube video that I can't find; probably in my partner's history since we watched reviews on the TV together.

I picked the X1 Omni over the Roborock because it has superior mopping performance on tile floors, but I think both would be good options. It seems like Roborock is more privacy compatible.

Yeah I went from a Roomba 960 (2018) to a Xiaomi Roborock S7 and in my research it was eye opening to see the level of tech difference between the two, even the modern Roomba is using a vision only model, and poorly based on reviews. For the same price, Roborock has Lidar scanning, AI obstacle avoidance and mopping. The thing is, it actually works in the Roborock, it can even spot cords and other misc items around my house and avoid them entirely.

Additionally since it maps using Lidar it completes a complete cleaning of my living room + kitchen area in 22 minutes, whole house in under 40 minutes. That is with it covering literally every square inch of carpet & tile instead of going around in random patterns...

The only annoying Xiaomi moments are when it recognizes a sock as dog poo then refuses to do anything in that area (or I couldn't figure out how to reset it). Ah, and it constantly gets stuck on bar stools pedestals.

When it comes to poo, I'd rather it be overly cautious than miss.

Then it becomes a smear campaign.

Can confirm, source: me, cat owner - had to take apart the Xiaomi / Roborock S5 (surprisingly easy), clean it up from cat vomit and also clean the living room entirely...

Why? The thing is supposed to clean dirt. My guess is it only cleans superficially anyway.

Have you replied to the correct comment?

The robot sucked up cat sick then smeared it around the room.

Cleaning everything seems a reasonable thing to do.

As a Roomba owner (with a Cat), I agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly.

I'm picturing this now and it is not a nice picture.

My sister has a horror story with the Roomba and dog poo…

I know mine still refuse to pass on an area where it got stuck once and I can't find how to reset this area to tell it's safe again.

And dryer rack legs...

Do you have any insight on how much of the SLAM data is being shared in both the Roomba and Xiaomi robots?

For example can you use them completely offline or do they 'need' to phone home to a remote server in order to work?

I've a Roborock (Xiaomi) S5 - processing should be done entirely local, but with the default firmware expect everything to be shared with a cloud.

Enter Valetudo - everything is local, including a webinterface to control the bot - installation was pretty flawless, upgrades (one so far) as well.

Check their list of supported robots: https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html

Thanks for the link, that looks like it'll fit the bill whenever I scrounge up a vacuum.

Although I think trying to convince vendors they want less data seems a little naive. More likely they'll lock out work like this entirely to make sure the free floor maps of your house (and schedule, and pet presence, and...) keep coming.

> More likely they'll lock out work like this entirely to make sure the free floor maps of your house (and schedule, and pet presence, and...) keep coming.

If your Roomba is rooted, then can't you disable OTA updates to prevent them from doing this?

I mean for future products. I'm not sure they'd care enough to patch up previous hardware. Just my personal opinion based on hardware manufacturers in general though.

In general, how is it owning a cleaning robot? Do they get stuck often? Are there any caveats? Do they clean good? How do they handle carpets?

Been thinking of getting one for a while now...

My experience with a couple lower end ones and a sheddy dog is that they work well for what they are. Don't expect magic. Expect low effort daily maintenance cleaning that keeps things spiffy. Maybe the higher end ones are significantly better? My bet is that the cleaning isn't all that different since among a product line they largely use the same chassis--there is only so much sweeper/suction/storage they can have.

The one upgrade that would be useful in retrospect is electronic fencing, but it isn't a big deal.

We have a 120qm2 apartment, 2 cats, 1 dog and a child. We couldn‘t live without our Roborock S7. It runs everyday and sometimes even more. No big issues, vacuums, mops, would buy it again in a heartbeat.

I have the S6 and it's so friggen useful even if just for the cat hair. The little mop addon is solid too! I just spray areas that have some sticky / dried on goop and it handles the rest.

I have 2 of them, a 2-3 year old Xiamoi S5 and some way newer Shark. The shark is frustrating to watch, it bangs into things constantly and doesn't give up. I have to go fix the Shark all the time because it drove over or into something, for instance I have a very low TV stand with open drawers, and it will try and try until it drives right in, and then gets stuck. So I have to have a lot more boundaries with the Shark than the Xiomi. The S5 is pretty impressive with its tech and I'd only buy a xiomi at. this point.

With that said, NEITHER are a replacement for a real vaccuum. I would only recommend them for wood floors to pick up pet hair and things like that. I'm really, realyy disappointed with how they work on carpet.

The xiomi is also a lot more powerful than my Shark.

If there's some vaccuum bot that can almost take the place of a real vaccuum on carpet please let me know because I don't vaccuum enough at all.

Unfortunately I also have halfway carpeted stairs and I need to get some sort of vaccuum that isn't miserable to use on stairs.. Please dont carpet stairs. I have a really nice Shark big vaccuum but its not fun to do stairs with it.

> If there's some vaccuum bot that can almost take the place of a real vaccuum on carpet please let me know because I don't vaccuum enough at all.

If that one famous vacuum-repairman AMA on Reddit is to be believed, even most home upright vacuums don't produce enough suction to properly clean carpet. No way they're gonna fit that much power in a little disc-shaped, quiet robot.

The Roomba is rather noisy. The key is that it vacuums daily. It might not be as good, but the frequency really helps.

Right, but without enough suction it's just not going to get any of the dirt down in the carpet, no matter how many times it goes over it. It'll just get light stuff that's right on the surface. Shitty upright vacs (so, the vast majority of upright vacs) sometimes try to make up for this with really aggressive brushes, but that barely helps and is really bad for the carpet—I don't think Roombas have enough room or power to even try that inferior work-around, let alone to generate a strong enough vacuum to really clean carpet.

That might be enough if the carpet starts relatively clean though - most of the deep down dirt gets pushed down through repeated use - stamping around a carpet with muddy boots will definitely ruin things quick but if you're conscientious about usage you're usually leaving surface level dirt that a mini-vacuum can scoop up if it's run frequently enough.

Roombas or similar things definitely can't keep a rug clean forever, but I think it's fair to say they'll make the times you need to get the heavy duty pet vac out less frequent.

I love mine.

Doesn't really get stuck (only time was when it "found" a fallen t-shirt behind a cabinet).

They do clean well for me, as long as I do it regularly. If I don't do it for a week it needs a second pass. But how much you need depends on external factors. Literally external, like how much dust gets in from outside.

Mine handled carpets well. IME of course. I didn't had pets when I had carpets, but at least with wooden floors cat hair gets cleaned fine.

Only caveat is if you have levels in your house you have to bring it up and down stairs but that's not asking much.

I have a dog that sheds so much that we couldn't keep up with it. So its been pretty life changing.

We've got cats - and we just invested in like four brooms for our small condo - if you see some fur accumulating you can sweep it up before it becomes a gigantic rug of cat fur.

I'll usually sweep our main hallway twice a day which is a nice two minute brain break from work. As someone with ADHD working these sorts of chores into a very frequent and regular schedule is important or nothing will ever happen.

I've got a relatively old Roomba. It's pretty great. Yeah it gets stuck on stuff when the kids leave things on the floor. Yeah the docking isn't super reliable. But... it's a level of passive, continuous cleaning that just makes everything easier around the house. I will definitely replace it when it dies, and spend more money on a better one.

I own a Neato D6, and I'm very happy with it.

As others have said, suction isn't as good as a regular vacuum. But what makes it great is it can do its thing while I'm away. I'm quite lazy and hate vacuuming, so there's no way I'd do it manually more than once a week. But the bot does its thing daily, so my house is generally cleaner. It also has a rotating brush that makes the carpet much fluffier than the regular vacuum, and seems to be better at pulling out hair.

Navigation-wise it's not too bad. I have to remove wires, socks and similar from the floor, or it WILL get tangled. The only thing which is a bit stupid is that it doesn't seem to know its height, so it can sometimes get stuck under things. But I've put some 2 mm wood blocks under that shelf, and now everyone's happy.

We have a Roomba, though I think it's back in its box in a cupboard now. In the end it needed so much babysitting that I gave up and bought a cordless stick vacuum. That is the best home appliance purchase I've ever made. The lower hassle of not needing to extend and roll up the cord compared with my older vaccuum massively outweighs any benefit from the Roomba. Grabbing the stick, quickly buzzing it around for a couple of minutes and putting it away again is far less hassle than babysitting the Roomba.

I feel like the major consideration is: do you have kids or pets? Then get one. Otherwise, probably not worth it.

If you have small-ish kids, you end up vacuuming everyday one way or the other. A Roomba's a decent stand-in for that. When my kids aren't at home, I mostly get by with my stick vacuum. (There the battery-driven ones really are nice.) With the stick vacuum it doesn't tend to leave my cables and rugs in random places, which makes the daily non-kid-time vacuuming similar levels of effort.

I assume pets are a similar deal, though I'm not a pet person.

One thing that hadn't occurred to me before getting the Roomba is that it vacuums a lot of places I wouldn't regularly get to on my own (e.g. under the sofa), and there's some benefit of having a cleaning session frequently that gets to a lot of those places that are otherwise hard to reach. But again, with kids not at home, I run it about once a week.

I'm genuinely curious about the mopping ones since I don't mop often, and always like it when I do. ;-)

Doesnt a Roomba eat lego bricks and other small toys?

Yes, this is why my Roomba doesn't get much use anymore in our house. There's always a loose toy somewhere. We have to have the kids pick up all the toys first before we can vacuum. At that point we end up using a Miele canister vac instead. We can see what we're about to vacuum up. It ended up being the better purchase over the Roomba.

I don't usually let it go in the kids room unless it's right after they've cleaned. The main problem areas in the apartment are right in front of the door, where they take off their shoes (so much sand, always!) and under the kitchen table. And from my messes: in the kitchen, from cooking. Those are the areas I was vacuuming most days by hand before. Again, the main problematic things for me are dragging around cables (from my stereo) and moving rugs, but those aren't more than a few seconds to put back. It gets stuck on something else maybe every 2-3 runs.

Regarding pets: I decided to give a cheaper Eufy RoboVac model a try a couple years ago to help keep things under control with a dog in the house. The maintenance on it to remove entangled dog hair was just too much in the end. Sure, manual vacuums have a similar problem but seem easier to maintain. The RoboVac had no computer vision (local or cloud) to help with obstacles, but that wasn't really as much as an issue as mechanical failures.

Also, my dog wanted to kill it.

Cleaning robots are good enough at their job to be a net positive to your quality of life.

This. Set them to go when you are out.

Ours scuffs the skirting boards a little, but the house is much cleaner. Behind doors, the tops of skirting and difficult corners still need doing.

I got a lower end one on sale and even it has made a positive difference for us. We vacuum less often, but the floor is noticeably cleaner.

My wife was positive we’d be vacuuming just as much, insisted it was just a novelty, but we went from pretty much daily to weekly manual with the bot running daily.

Probably obvious but we realized letting it run in the evening after dinner while we clean made the most sense. You wake up to a clean floor. Prior to that we had it running in the middle of the day while we worked. Effectively it never seemed quite as clean.

I definitely recommend getting one.

Sounds nice, do these Chinese brands depend on the cloud or are any local-only?

they work locally(local network via app or physical buttons) unless you want to use it remotely via internet. The annoying thing is that it still forces you to "create an account" when you set it up. This was not required 4 years ago but it's required now.

I own a Xiaomi Vacuum Robot and that is by default very much not local only. However there is a project [1][2] to hack some of those devices and make them local-only.

With limited functionality they work of cause without app and cloud connection.

[1]: https://dontvacuum.me/ [2]: https://valetudo.cloud/

Thanks for this, I had a pending action item to look for something like this for my robot.

On a spin-off topic from this project: it says on his website

> The Apache-2.0 license is a very permissive license and a lot of work is being shared for free here, so I trust people to not take advantage of that and sell Valetudo; especially not as their own work. Please don’t disappoint me. Thank you.

I really don't understand why people pick licenses that specifically allow for things that they don't want to happen. It's specially baffling when the author is clearly aware of the limitation!

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31684910

Wow, those both look incredibly slick. I've got a cheap like $150 chinese vacuum one and a mopping one but I might have to upgrade if they ever die. So do they actually handle floor vs carpet sweeping/mopping, don't get stuck on stuff on the floor, refill/empty, and you don't have to change the mop pads each time?

That is wild as that basically handles all the prep I have to do for mine. Albeit, 1000-1500 is quite a bit more.

Yeah it lifts up the mopping part when it senses carpet (stops + lifts up) then proceeds so it won't get stuck / drag the dirty mop on the carpet.

There is a limit to raised carpets though from my understanding, I think anything over .5" (13mm) is too tall and it may not go onto it.

The one downside is having to clean the mopping pads since I didn't buy the 2x the price auto cleaning station.

I've had great experiences with the Xiaomi products I've bought (34" monitor, earbuds, security cam, air purifier, soundbar). They are popular here in Thailand and at a really, really great price point

While I really dislike the android skin they run on their phones, they also do built really nice phones

Still happy with my Pixel 5 so I haven't gotten the chance to try their phones yet

Xiaomi also has working home assistant integration. I have mine set up to start vacuuming when everyone leaves the apartment.

I have an S7 and it’s been ridiculously stupid. My old Roomba was less aggravating. The S7 takes 50 minutes to clean 800sqft, always gets stuck in a high rug or chair support. Frequently gets tangled on cables and toys. I can clean tht floor in 10 min with a stick vacuum. Anyone wanna buy an old S7? Barely used, frequently kicked.

The Roomba j7+ cord and object detection is working well for me, although it's (probably) more expensive than the Chinese offerings. Regardless, it was a huge step up from my precis Neato Botvac connected (which was probably 5-6 years old though).

I've owned Neato, Roomba and Roborock. Hands down Roborock is what I recommend people to buy. Neato had such a great leg up when it first came to market by having the first, and best, Lidar implementation - but their product was marred by horrible customer support, batteries that are garbage and just general failures of hardware that are impossible / too expensive to fix. By the time I gave up on Neato I had 4 of the same robot that I was piece parting out as components died (again and again). Talk about a company that banks on eWaste to keep the sales cycle going.

I'm thankful Amazon bought Roomba - one less reason to even consider them as an option considering all of the current gen vacs are sporting onboard cameras + CV (poop avoidance, is that really a huge concern?).

Poop avoidance is a big concern for me. I have two cats. I’ve had my robovacuum spread vomit all over the kitchen.

> will probably be out offering integration with home plumbing to avoid any manual intervention for months at a time.

I can't even get a chicken waterer to work for months at a time, no way I'd let a robot access. Even so, is it so bad to let China take the lead, western design can go on vacay and rip off the results when they get back!

> can go on vacay and rip off the results when they get back

You can clone the design if there's capital left after consumers have been buying the competitor for years, but can you clone the manufacturing process or price as easily when you're years behind?

We see with Qualcomm CPUs and Android phones - the internals are still a few years behind iPhone after about a decade, and Apple still takes the lions share of profits in the phone market.

I can second this. Roborock was already years ahead when we bought ours (3 years ago?) and when I look at what their latest models can do it's pretty clear that Roomba forgot to invest into new technologies.

Absolutely agree. The lack of LiDAR (or equiv) seems to really hamper iRobot's effectiveness - I had an iRobot i7 and its mapping/pathfinding was ramming in to things at near top speed and ricocheting off the walls.

They also still sell vacuum and mopping* robots as seperate units which just drives up the cost. My old setup of the two robots took somewhere on the order of 5-6 hours to do a ~100m2 apartment.

I moved to a Roborock and then Dreame bot (someone really needs to talk to Xiaomi about all the sub-brands :P) comparitively, they both took around 1.5 to just under 2 hours to do a much better job.

I actually felt huge guilt selling my two iRobot's to someone, wanting to tell them they were complete junk and they were wasting their money.

*There is always mixed opinions on mopping effectiveness, but the iRobot roll-and-spit model of mopping is truly horrendous.

Based on the comments here I did a quick look at Amazon and was surprised to not even see a single vacuum only robot from Evovacs. At least not prominently showcased.

Why are there only mixed models and what are the benefits?

If I look at my place the ground floor is tiled and the top floor is all carpet.

That means I would need two vacuums anyway as they haven’t learned yet to climb stairs.

Why wouldn’t I want a vacuum only model for upstairs? For downstairs the universal model is great obviously. But upstairs?

I know there were a lot of simple vac only bots in the roborock line up. S5 and similar the mopping funciton is a small pad that you manually wet and it drags along behind. It kind of sucks but if you were in the market for just a vacuum, you remove the bracket and it's fine. The robot has no knowledge of the mop as there isn't a tank.

The S6Max that has a tank, you can also remove (easily, two button clips) and it'll not attempt any mopping feature. It also supposedly doesn't squirt water on to the pad when it knows its on carpet, but at some stage you may be dragging a mildly damp cloth on to the carpet. (was never an issue for me, the pad was never that wet that you could reasonably detect it on the carpet)

Overall mopping with drag-behind pads is pretty... opportunistic? Its not great and you'll be in a position where you have to manually mop. Many models are switching to the spinning buffer pads which is a much better solution (that's the Dreame W10) but it refuses to do carpet. So its always a matter of finding a model that fits your use case.

>That means I would need two vacuums anyway as they haven’t learned yet to climb stairs.

Many allow for multi floor mapping on a single bot, but stairs will always be a problem for the Daleks. :P

S5 works the same like you describe S6Max, maybe you're thinking about some older one.

I don't understand this, I had a Neato before I switched to iRobot and the lidar just seemed to be the worst idea for a home environment.

On an almost weekly basis it would fail to start because it would think it was moved if something just moved a little bit nearby or a cat just happened to be sleeping nearby. This generally forced me to remap

Then it would constantly get lost and be confused about what room it was in. Seemingly for the same reasons of things moving around.

A home isn't a static environment and a camera just seems much more efficient. Not that a camera is perfect, but at least a camera can account for things moving around were lidar cannot.

Or was this a case of Neato just not being good? The lidar issues was why I went with iRobot. It was a worse vacuum but if it actually works consistently than I can just have it run more often.

I've a Xiami / Roborock S5 for almost 5 years now (give or take a few months) and their LIDAR implementation is absolutely genius - no issues whatsoever, no matter what gets moved around or not...

Must've been Neatos implementation i suppose...

On top of the really top-notch LIDAR the S5 is beautifully engineered as well - basically everything is a module (i.e. wheel+motor) which is plugged in and secured with a few screws - really good repairability and also spares are available (needed so far: 1 LIDAR motor, 2,50€; 1 resettable fuse for charging).

I have been eyeing the new Roborock S7, but that has both lidar and camera I think.

Interesting that others handle this better. I had heard great things about Neato before so that's why I went it. But it just ended up being more frustrating and not worth it.

Guess I just had a really bad experience.

I would not complement S5 that much. Mine can never return to the dock alone, which is pretty basic - it knows where it is, but tries to move there from a weird angle, repeats this few times and ultimately loudly fails. Also, it always gets stuck on dryer rack.

The engineering on the modularity is neat though, I agree.

Hm, that's strange - i've even used mine in 2 apartments now, on 4 floors no less..

No issues whatsoever - on the floor where there is no dock it just goes back to the point you dropped it off and started cleaning...

> Also, it always gets stuck on dryer rack.

Have you tried to put some magnetic tape (barrier) on to the legs?

For Dreame Z10 (it also has LiDAR and Xiaomi sub brand), I confirmed the same. Moving objects is not a problem.

My Roborock with Lidar has had no issues.

> Or was this a case of Neato just not being good?

I think this is a software issue with Neato. My previous bot was the cheapest Ecovacs with LiDAR and vacuum base station, and it could adapt to furniture movement, large boxes appearing and disappearing in the living room, etc without too much trouble.

LiDAR (on the Ecovacs bots) does struggle with mirrors and floor-to-ceiling windows. Even the X1 Omni is convinced there's another room "inside" the large mirror I have in the living room. It's okay though since I just draw a no-go zone or no-go lines on the map wherever there's something odd.

Really the best results will always use sensor fusion - LiDAR mapping + camera object avoidance + physical bump sensor seems to work pretty well on the Ecovacs bots. I love the improvement in cable and shoelace avoidance since upgrading to a model with vision.

> but at least a camera can account for things moving around were lidar cannot

Why do you say that, am I missing something? Surely both technologies are able to keep "looking" as the hoover moves around, the lidar ones surely aren't doing a single analysis and then not checking again?

Others have mentioned that this may just be a problem with the Neato software.

The issue I was having with the neato is that is exactly what it was doing. It would come off its dock, do a scan around it. And if things were too different it would go back to its dock and complain that it has been moved.

So I had to find a place that things never moved, but that proved difficult. Even small things like the trash can shifting or books on a shelf shifting seem to throw it off.

I finally got to the point that I basically tricked it with blocking it from seeing certain things near its dock but that is less than ideal.

Now once it did that initial scan it seemed to be mostly ok, but it did seem too often get lost near my computer where the chair often moves. It would constantly tell me it was lost and I had to pick it up and put it back on the dock. Or my favorite was when it seemed to try to dock on the other side of my home.

My feeling (and has been confirmed by the iRobot) was that at least a camera with decent AI could account for a moving object vs most other things being the same. It is far from perfect, but compared to the Neato the camera has been leagues better.

I am very curious though how other Lidar system handle this since I would assume that there is a lack of data available to identify a change in environment vs a moved object.

That does sound shit, sorry you've had that experience!

But I believe lidar should be able to do the same as a camera in terms of real-time updates - from a tech point of view it's just a different type of sensor to a camera, there's no reason (other than difficulty/cost) why lidar robots can't be constantly scanning & understanding the difference between a chair that you've moved since 5 minutes earlier and a cat that keeps moving. Both camera and lidar products can be made dumb enough to fail badly, or smart enough to do a great job. After all, self driving cars have been demo'd using full lidar, it's not like that technology itself takes hours to image a room.

Of course i can only talk about my Roborock S5, but that one handles each and any changes in the environment flawlessly.

While cleaning, you can watch it on the map (in the cloud/app as well as when rooted on the local webserver) and can see it constantly scanning the surroundings and things appearing when they do.

I once saw an object "appearing" when there should've been none when i was out, when i got back home it was my cat that wanted to roadblock the Roborock, laying on the floor...

I have a neato and yeah, I think its neato's software. Its chock full'o'bugs. It routinely loses network connectivity and has to be rebooted to restore it. Of course, support will blame signal, but I've had that issue too and the behavior is different. A dead spot will just lose signal until it moves past it and gracefully recovers. This causes a weird error beep and then it doesn't recover.

Beyond that, I've had it vacuum a floor twice. When it finished, it showed the space twice, because it became disoriented. Basically, it didn't just think the room changed shape, it thought it doubled in size!

I've had it get lost because it thought it was on the opposite side of a rectangular room from where it actually was.

They never update it to fix these things and, IMO, haven't shipped a truly new product in several years. I'm not shocked that a lot of other lidar-based products have surpassed them now.

What you described is completely unrelated to LiDAR, and could just as lazily be implemented with a SLAM based vision stack. LiIDAR and vision based systems make 3d measurements of what the sensors see, whenever they look at it. What's done with those measurements in software isn't related to the ability to collect the real-time sensing of those distances.

> My old setup of the two robots took somewhere on the order of 5-6 hours to do a ~100m2 apartment

I mean, yes, the first time, but my i7 takes like 2 hours to do my ~140sqm apartment?

I've felt that the iRobot mapping was acceptable.

Once my i7 has generated a proper map, it will will slow down when it approaches known walls, or even places where obstacles have been several times in the past. It will need to bump into the obsticle or wall to confirm its position though.

It does use a mostly predictable back and forth pattern, taking note of areas with walls/obstacles, and after the main sweeping it will combe back to go around the obstacles, and finally (optional) do a sweep of the walls. Then it moves onto the next room.

The system does have limitations. For example, if it needs assistance in the middle of a clean job, after you fix it, there is a reasonable chance that it will do dumb stuff afterwards, like missing a large section of floor. (It seems to even know this, but have problematic coding that prevents it from doing the right thing).

But yeah, I'd not call the mapping good, just acceptable.

There are other annoyances like the i7 battery being so small, especially since they have a giant battery compartment. Like seriously big enough like ni-cad batteries battery of equivalent capacity. But they only offer a slightly larger capacity battery as part of their Costco exclusive model, and try to lock out third party batteries. The net result is that even when brand new, it could not quite do a single floor of my house in one go, needing to go recharge for like 40 minutes before it could do the last 10 minutes of cleaning.

The app is not very good. It does not even do some basic things like prompt the user for regular maintenance periodically based on number of hours used.

The floor maps in the app are weird. For example, on one of my floors, the online map decided that the entrance to one of my rooms was on a completely different wall from where the entrance really was. It thought the actual door was just a wall. However the actually mapping data on the robot was just fine. It knew where the door really was, and never tried to drive though the wall where the online map though the door was.

Doesn't iRobot make more from military contracts than consumer facing?

It looks like they sold their military business in 2016.

I recently upgraded to a Eufy X8 and it's great. It still gets stuck but on rare occasions.

Does the Omni handle rooms with big area rugs? Our issue is a hardwood main floor that has a bunch of rugs.

It will steer around the rug automatically I think, and you can mark the rug locations as no-go zones or no-mop zones. The Roborock is better for mixed floor types because it will actually raise the mop up to vacuum in no-mop zones. The X1 needs to have the mop removed manually to do a vacuum-only pass.

I recently went from a Roomba S9+ to a RoboRock S7 MaxV Ultra and it was like night and day. The RoboRock has not gotten stuck on a single cat toy, cable, or sock yet. It doesn't bump into furniture repeatedly. It is considerably quieter. I feel like it is the first time I can actually safely start running a robot vacuum while not at home, and not worry that I'll come home to a robot tangled in some random object.

> S7 MaxV Ultra

Gosh, we're approaching the marketing singularity

The "Pro +" is still missing.

Worst is that it probably works.

How does it avoid cables? I have an earlier Roborock version and while I love it and will defend it until the day it dies, I've found that cables are the absolute nemesis. Does your version have computer vision?

Pretty sure my version is a standard RoboRock S7, only with the "Ultra" base that also cleans the mop. I might have lucked out with the cables so far. Fwiw I do try to clean the floor of clutter a bit when I know I'm going to run it, but it has still encountered charging cables etc during the run. It's just taken a picture of them as "obstacles" and gone around them.

Being that it's more expensive, the RoboRock should definitely be better than Roomba.

The part that makes it more expensive is the "Ultra" base. The unit itself with an equivalent base to that of my Roomba is about 200 USD less expensive than the Roomba where I live.

I have had super poor experience with iRobot to the point that we discarded the vacuume+mop unit we had.

Maybe they are buying the brand, more than the tech. I bought an amazon basics vac for something like 60 USD which just stole the design of the latest cheap vac, so presumably can plunder the more advanced models too, once the market is ready for them.

What’s the repair story? I have one of the earlier vacuum Roombas (620, bought 8 years ago, before most advancements happened), and I can still find both 1st and 3rd party replacement parts and repair almost everything myself.

Does mop pad really work? I only have roborock with no fancy mop pad cleaning base station but ignoring that all it does is dragging a wet cloth around. I don't see that helping much

My previous bot was a "wet mop pad" Ecovacs model without any of the bells and whistles, and it was pretty worthless. I got the X1 Omni specifically because it has dual rotating scrubbers, self-clean/dry, and self-fill. Night and day difference. I feel like I could eat off the floor every morning.

How easy are the Chinese models to repair? I can't speak for iRobot's mop bots, but the older model vacuums were insanely easy to repair. I had a motor die on one, and it was about ten phillips head screws to get to it, remove it, and pop in a $10 replacement. I was amazed to see a modern consumer item that was so easy to repair.

Of course, this is a model I bought used almost ten years ago. Not sure how similar current models are.

I can only speak about the Roborock S5, but I assume the newer ones are fairly comparable.

I once had it give me an error that the main fan (for suction) was broken. In this case, there was a small particle lunged into it, so it wouldn't spin. All it took was a little wiggle, and it spun again.

It's definitely more than 10 phillips head screws, but less than 30. I guess it depends which part broke, but I had to disassemble pretty much the whole thing. I can promise you that my repair skills or experiences are very novice, but I managed just fine. Had two screws left over after putting it all back together as is tradition, but I suppose they weren't mission critical, as this was like 3 years back and Dobby is still cleaning like a champ.

Like half a year ago, the LIDAR broke. Ordered a new one on amazon for 20 bucks, unscrewed now about 28 screws and exchanged the broken part. Put it all together, again tossed away a screw that left me wondering where it belonged, and it still works to this day.

This was a very long way of saying "Roborocks repair fairly easily, and there are numerous tutorials online."

Edit: BTW, Dobby has been cleaning for almost 500 hours now. At that price point, there is no cheaper hourly cleaning staff :)

I also have an S5. Had a LIDAR that wouldn't spin. Paid 15€ or so for an identical part on Amazon. It took 5 minutes and a single screwdriver to swap it.

At 5 minutes you were really quick! For me it was probably like 20-30, but like I said: it's not necessarily something I'm skilled at. Either way, repairs are fairly quick and easy!

From my experience super easy.

We went from a "dumb" Eufy RoboVac 11 to a Roomba i3+ EVO 3550 and I honestly wish we stayed with the Eufy or done more research. I just assumed Roomba was like the gold standard of robot vacuums. Its had so many stupid issues including randomly lighting up and making sounds at night which wakes me up since its in our bedroom. I haven't talked to their support because honestly I'm sure it'll be like all other consumer electronics and they'll just waste my time running through BS troubleshooting steps and not actually fix anything

You can turn off the lights in the app. This was annoying me too. They added it as a feature recently. I think the idea is that you know your Roomba is docked correctly and charging if the light is flashing

Do you remember where in app? I checked a few times and don't see anything.

Go to "Robot Settings", then "Status Lights" about halfway down the page

It’s crazy tho, even the cheapest roborock w/ LiDAR smokes every roomba out there. It’s hard to justify the more expensive models unless but the advanced feature sets are tempting.

You are absolutely right, but I’m not sure I want to have a free roaming camera and LiDAR sensor from a Chinese company in my home. Absolute piss poor track record of data collection, I’ll happily stick to my roomba. It’s definitely semi dumb but it’s predictable in its quirks. It’s also repairable with copious supply of original parts. Note also that they still innovate, including the self empty bin that actually works, which others have now copied. Just sayin’.

> You are absolutely right, but I’m not sure I want to have a free roaming camera and LiDAR sensor from a Chinese company in my home. Absolute piss poor track record of data collection

I am not sure if Amazon is more trustworthy than that.

I would say Amazon has plenty of problems, but also plenty more incentive to behave and try to be careful with the data.

Don't they give camera feeds to law enforcement without warrant?

Yes, and they’re still more trustworthy than a Chinese company

Kinda. The problem is your threat model, no? If you think of US law enforcement as adversary, using Amazon products is a very bad idea.

If US law enforcement is your adversary you’re already fucked. All US companies are subject to subpoena.

Asking for data, and getting it without warrant, is golden.

This is legal for the FBI. An illegal wiretap is not.

A subpoena needs to be signed off by a judge. And there is an appeals process.

I mean there are countless documented situations where U.S. law enforcement has dramatically overreached or misstepped, and personally, I’d prefer people who have cameras and microphones in my home to require the U.S. judiciary to review some facts and agree to issue a warrant for any access. Amazon doesn’t meet this test and so this acquisition likely means we’ll be parting ways with iRobot equipment in our home.

I guess you could say my threat model is not “the United States is my adversary”, and more that I appreciate some checks and balances being present on ‘local yokel’ police departments which are empirically not always doing the right thing (especially where oversight is low).

Not if you’re more worried about the American government than the Chinese government.

How so, logically speaking, setting xenophobia and/or racism aside?

This is exactly my concern. Imagine a DoD contractor with a remote-controllable, lidar+camera (+mic?) equipped robot based in the USA's main rival country. Does that seem like a good idea? Should we put a fleet of Chinese robots in SpaceX's facility? Lockheed's? Why not?

It's not just "Murica first". If these were European companies, I'd jump ship very quickly to an iRobot competitor with a superior product, thanks to EU's data collection laws and USA's OK relationship with EU. But they aren't, they operate in a regime where questionable data collection is the norm and theft of IP is called "R&D".

Yes, Amazon will use iRobot to vacuum more data than dirt, but at least they are part of the US and EU laws. They provide gov services for a ton of US DoD/NASA infra! China could and would just thumb their nose at us without much concern.

I'm less worried about what a Chinese surveillance device will do in my house than an Amazon one. Only the latter has the ability and history of turning over data to those who can arrest me.

A bit of a nit to clarify:

It seems your actual complaint is that if US Law Enforcement decides you are a target of interest, they would think to go to Amazon and Amazon's reputation is that they'd cooperate in handing over data, whereas the LE officers would neither bother to ask, nor expect cooperation from the Chinese companies.

The Chinese (or anyone) can certainly turn over their data to people who can arrest you, if they decide you are a target.

Chinese companies operating in the US still have to abide by US laws, so they are under the same jurisdiction that compels Amazon to turn over data to law enforcement. If Chinese companies don't comply, they get kicked out of the market.

True, I was thinking only of the Chinese main companies, not their US subsidiaries. So, yes, there really is no advantage there.

Well, that is a fair point. Each person has their own threat model.

I work in tech, often adjacent or on national projects or highly sensitive R&D. We have regular counter-espionage training.

You are concerned about domestic law enforcement learning about you. Both are valid threat models.

As an editorial, I support almost everything EFF and related orgs do, precisely to reduce the fear of US spying that makes China look like a better option (What a state of affairs!)

One concern people should have about foreign tech spying on them is the possibility it undermines the stability of their jobs.

Let’s say it exfiltrates data that eventually allows a foreign competitor to build sophisticated metallurgy for turbines. It’s not like all foreign countries eagerly hire foreign talent, moreover it puts domestic expertise at risk as well as all the collateral subcontractors and suppliers… so, yeah, super metallurgy-guy's job may be secure (can get hired by the foreign competitor), even if the company collapses but not the jobs of 10,000s who work for suppliers, etc.

China could easily turn that data over to American law enforcement if they wanted to see a person they considered a threat to them arrested but that person was outside of their jurisdiction.

China and Amazon are both threats to privacy.

Are there known examples of this happening?

It has not happened, does not mean that it could not happen. Chinese companies are automatically more cooperative than us companies because they are trained to cooperate in their home country already.

But so far I suppose the indigenous big tech spying apparatus has been effective enough to not need foreign operators help.

The former will just blackmail you.

The bar for China successfully leveraging some damaging information on a US citizen in the US is pretty high. Meaning they have to have something very damning against a person in a position of interest. Not impossible but narrow.

The bar for leveraging general information about a regular US citizen in the US by a company like Amazon or the US government is very, very low. One thing I see happening really soon (if not already) is such data being used by medical insurers to algorithmically decide your coverage and rates. Or for authorities to use to establish whatever pattern they want that can be damning even if circumstantial.

Looking around, all of this already happens in the US even without the help of an extra massive data collection net. From companies like Google or PayPal algorithmically locking you out of your critical digital identity, your paid services, your money with simply a boilerplate "sorry not sorry, don't let the door hit you on your way out", to authorities stealing all your neighbors' smart doorbell recordings to see what you have been doing and Stingraying the hell out of everyone on the off chance that they're going to catch the person they're looking for. Anything that makes that easier or opens up more avenues to do more of that is definitely going to be used (and abused) as such.

But the former is acquiring information that may lead to them blackmailing you and/or your loved ones into spying against your nation, which may lead to more than just an arrest.

You're comparing a threat that sounds cool and scary and is practically non-existent to a mundane abuse of privacy that happens every day.

Why does it have to be either? My comment was merely about leak of data to China. Whether it is non-existent or not is something I'd rather not find out.

It is after all a personal decision and to each their own.

>Amazon will use iRobot to vacuum more data than dirt

Well put.

I see the synergy with their Alexa, Echo etc.

Had the same thought. Don't know what data iRobot collects, but perhaps its telemetry includes square footage of your rooms / house? (Amazon can use that to determine how wealthy you are). Attach an echo on that with microphone and camera, and the iRobot could even sneakily follow you and spy on you - Alexa always with you in your house, anywhere!

With Alexa, there is a manual hardware switch where you can turn off the microphones. With Echo Show, there is a manual hardware shutter for the camera.

I'm not sure if that is the answer to privacy concerns, but at least it is there.

> theft of IP is called "R&D".

When it comes to patents, I'm fine with that. Our system of patents has become a significant encumbrance to innovation and is causing US companies to fall behind.

There is a WaPo writer salivating over this take.

I don't really want continuous surveillance of the interior of my home by any company from any nation. There should be some places where you get to just exist without being monitored.

So far my solution has been just to make sure everything is disconnected from wifi. Not so sure that will actually work for that much longer, if it still does at all (cellular, more extensive mesh networking, etc.).

I think that places in the US will start having to push for the right to turn off and disconnect (yeah, shades of Max Headroom here).

Is there a tangible difference between chinese and american companies when it comes to privacy? It seems either will sell your data to the highest bidder.

pi-hole the roborock subdomains. You'll loose starting via the app, but the robot stills works.

But what is the difference, is the track record of a democracy less grim with your privacy? " Amazon admitted its Ring security cameras have sent recordings to police without the knowledge or consent of the people who own the cameras.

Responding to an inquiry from Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Amazon said in a letter dated July 1 that it has handed over private recordings to police 11 times in 2022. The company said it was complying with an "emergency request."

Amazon Handed Ring Videos to Cops Without Warrants

https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-ring-police-videos-securi...

Yup, that was my thinking, even if the Chinese company owns the data, they wont be sharing that with the PD or NSA , etc... if they are, then really doesn't matter who owns your data.

I guess is better to have a device that will share your data with domestic entities that actually spy on you and harm your privacy. If someone "has to" own my data, I prefer that someone to be in another jurisdiction.

> I’m not sure I want to have a free roaming camera and LiDAR sensor from a Chinese company in my home.

Don't you already have that in your pocket?

Camera and mic (ecovacs highend models have) is a bit consideration, but I don't care CCP take my home's LiDAR information. It should be boring.

The Roborock I use works totally fine without any internet connection. I just put it down and pressed a button.

It's also user-serviceable.

> Ecovacs X1 Omni

It costs $1400 here, literally $1000 more than the basic Roomba models, and still $400-600 more than buying a Roomba mop and vacuum separately.

The Omni is AUD $2500.

It had better be truly amazing, it's 4x the price I paid for my old Roomba 780 many a year ago that did a decent job of it until it died after 5-6 years of service.

Does the list of obstacles these things avoid include pet accidents like poop, cat puke, etc? Cause we have a pukey cat and a robo vac might make things much much worse.

Youtube review videos show that it does. I don't have a pet, so no first-hand experience to share.

> a mopping vacuum bot with actual rotating mop scrubbers, AI vision obstacle avoidance, LIDAR mapping, and most importantly fully automated water fill & mop pad cleaning at the base station.

And here I am using a broomstick 5 min every day... I feel like we're going to hit the great filter pretty soon

> We just got an Ecovacs X1 Omni - a mopping vacuum bot with actual rotating mop scrubbers, AI vision obstacle avoidance, LIDAR mapping, and most importantly fully automated water fill & mop pad cleaning at the base station

Well for 1500 Eur it better does all of it and even more

What I don't understand is how iRobot, once an iconic innovator, could move so slow and innovate so little that Roborock, a company founded in 2014, could beat the shit out of iRobot.

I think we have the answer now: They focused on getting acquired. That is never good for the consumer.

Data. Amazon bought data. Mostly.

10 million customers = data about 10 million homes. Plus some revenues, why not.

That's exactly what makes this a good acquisition, right? Roomba has the brand/trademark recognition in the US and solid marketshare but a stagnant product, which iRobot apparently does not have the expertise needed to keep improving. For Amazon that should be a pretty straightforward technical/ML problem to solve to get back to the forefront of where Xiaomi, Ecovacs, etc. are.

I sincerely desire to avoid having a mobile, internet connected device that equips many sensors and cameras in my home that is designed, manufactured and supported by a Chinese company.

I don't want this with an American company either. Local only.

The only true way to go. Honestly nothing has made me consider going device free like all of the telemetry these days.

Amazon isn’t exactly pure here, can we have neither?

Yes we totally can. Honestly, the idea of telemetry is general enough that it can and should be legislated. At the very least products should advertise that they produce telemetry when connected to the internet and have an option or have to distribute the knowledge of how to disable it.

I sincerely desire to avoid having a mobile, internet connected device that equips many sensors and cameras in my home.

Also agree.

What about effectiveness of the vacuuming? That's where Roomba is superior afaik, and the feature is pretty essential since you buy them to clean floors and carpet, not to delight you with the smoothest navigation.

Does it still double as a poop spreader or did they finally add a sensor for that?

As a former roomba owner, the issue I always had was that it was pretty terrible about coverage. The random walk it did often left large areas vacuumed as it had no sense of where it had and had not vacuumed.

It’s very methodical and works in lines at home - unless it gets into chair-leg hell under the kitchen table (table and 6 chairs, 28).

Your information is many years out of date. The latest model maps your house (and has been doing so for a long time), uses a camera to identify and avoid obstacles including poop, and automatically empties its bin.

- Ecovacs obstacle avoidance requires cloud.

- Ecovacs control requires cloud.

No thanks. I'm not giving my home to China, America or whatever.

Roborock seems to be better. Anyway it should be blocked by the home firewall, just to be safe.

Do you know how they work on tile? I see everyone recommend for wood flooring, but my house is mainly a textured tile. Things like a regular vacuum make loud clanks rolling over and between them. Wondering if a robovac would even work, or get stuck, or just be obnoxiously loud rolling around. Anyone know?

I don't know how wild and crazy your tiles are, but I got mine specifically for my tile floor.

Cool, thanks for the reply.

> Meanwhile, iRobot still hadn’t figured out how to make an effective stand-alone mop bot, much less an auto fill station or combined bot that actually works

But then maybe that's where the synergy is. Amazon is probably ahead of everyone on the planet with machine vision. They have the Amazon Go shops, and nobody else has anything that comes close. If they take iRobot's robotics knowledge and couple it with their own machine learning expertise, who will be able to compete with them?

I have a Roborock S4 and I love the thing (though I want to upgrade to a mopping one at some point)

But on the S4 I find sometimes it underperforms with navigation: it ends up relying on the bumpers and it smashes into table and desk legs even though the lidar should give it a heads-up (the legs are visible on the map it creates).

I'm wondering if it updates the map as it cleans but only _uses_ the updated map once the current clean is finished. Hmmmm

I mean not trying to start a flame war, but everyone is praising how great roborock is but the reality is, most of Xiaomi/Roborock technology is stolen/reversed engineered from Neato. Chinese robot vacuum would not even be close to their current capabilities if it wasn’t for the LiDAR on the XV11. If you look at the tear down from the first couple gen, the PCB and components were exactly the same compared to Neatos. (I owned both Neato and Roborock vacuums).

Why does it matter? In grand scheme of things there are now more people who have access to cheaper and efficent cleaning systems.

All companies are reverse engineering the Universe anyway. It's not like you build these technologies out of thin air.

Why does it matter in the grand scheme of things to point out stolen tech?

Please spend the next year doing a bunch of free engineering and design work for me, thanks in advance.

The companies knew that copyright infringement is a possibility when developing the tech. They knew the reward was still worth it despite of that.

I am not getting anything designing work for you. On the other hand I can launch my own side projects. I know that if they are any good people are going to copy and start rip offs. I am willing to take that risk.

Why does large-scale corporate IP theft matter? Well, for one thing, I can't imagine the next Neato being willing to invest in all that R&D if a chinese company is going to rip it off and sell it for peanuts, just so the internet can say "wow, this chinese product is amazing, and I don't know why corporate IP theft matters!"

The risk of someone ripping off your idea, designs, etc. has always existed, exists now more than ever with the internet, yet it doesn’t seem to stop people with ideas from trying to take those ideas to fruition.

I’ve never talked to any rational person with an idea they were passionate about who said they weren’t interested in continuing with it because someone else might steal it.

Then you've never talked to any VC or angel investor.

A primary concern of any investor is whether you have a defensible 'moat" for your product or service - can you make something that will then have a high barrier to entry of competitors.

If you cannot articulate how you will have reasonably solid protection from patents. copyright, or trade secret practices, good luck getting investment.

Your only strategy will be to somehow make & stock ready to ship as much of your easily copied product as you can before promoting it, and hope your promotion, marketing, and initial sales are a huge hit BEFORE some Chinese rip-off artist starts marketing it on AliBaba in single-digit days. I've read of cases where people had their product literally found for sale on Chinese sites before their first marketing & customer shipments started, because the design was ripped off from the factory.

The only reason engineers in the US adopted "clean rooms" was to circumvent copyright law, not because they simply weren't willing to copy IP from their competitors. US companies still invested heavily in R&D. Maybe Chinese companies will do the same?

It's a free market. There are plenty of companies investing in R&D even after knowing that there is the possibility of copyright infringement. There is still a huge upside in developing these tech.

Chinese companies have been stealing IP like this for decades, and companies are still doing R&D, so clearly it hasn’t stopped anything yet.

> If you look at the tear down from the first couple gen, the PCB and components were exactly the same compared to Neatos.

I'm interested, please link to that.

Just look at the tear down videos on the XV11 compared the any roborock tear down. I would link you the XV11hacking site but seems like it’s down. It had everything from firmware to schematics that hobbyist did in the early 2010s since it was the cheapest way to get a 2D LiDAR (pulling it from a the vacuum itself).

You said they were "exactly the same" circuit boards. You're saying you were able to make that evaluation using multiple tear-down videos that weren't doing a side-by-side?

I'm not the GP poster, but doing a visual comparison, if you've got chips of the same size and shape in the same places, and the same passives in the same places, and the trace routing is also visually the same between them, wouldn't you feel that's pretty definitive?

All of humanity is copying from each other and building on top of each other.

Does it really matter?

It matters because people who take risk and innovate should be rewarded. When that fails, theres no point for anyone to take risks and release new products.

And yet somehow the result has been a vast acceleration in the rate of improvement of robotic vacuums. It isn't evident that we are in the right here.

The result is also all of the innovative product ideas that never see the light of day because two weeks after launch there’d be a Chinese knock off on the market for half the price making it impossible to recoup R&D.

That’s a big reason behind the push to SaaS and server based solutions.

  > there’d be a Chinese knock off on the market for half the price

cheaper, faster, better... sounds like... innovation?

What about copying someone else’s design, making minor improvements (often regressions due to incomplete RE), and having a lower cost basis sounds like innovation to you?

well, i guess it depends... there are cases where something is totally copied 1-1 then maybe costs cuts are in labor, or they are in quality

in the case of worse quality, wouldn't the market just filter out such inferior products via competition? same with labor practices and bad pr from that.

additionally, if the 'minor improvements' are what people want (sometimes as a trade-off to quality) then thats what the market has signaled it prefers...

if the originating company doesn't meet that preference or demand, why should some admittedly state-provided protection (some might say monopoly) of intellectual property be able to protect them from competitors who will?

Facebook stealing from snapchat. Youtube stealing from instagram who stole from tiktok , stealing from vine etc etc. I don't think it stopped other people from taking risks.

As a consumer, I don't give a damn about these companies copying each other, I just want better products. But yeah, if I worked at iRobot I would be annoyed.

This is the moral theory behind patent laws, and I’ve never seen definitive evidence that it actually helps, and a lot of examples where IP law completely hampers innovation or at least adds layers of bureaucracy.

I’m glad we don’t have to deal with this issue as much in software. I can’t imagine that a world where all the companies actually tried to enforce their software patents would be better for anyone but the lawyers.

Well, it looks like that didn’t stop these guys from innovating, even though it was stolen after.

And it's quite disingenuous for IT people to make a fuss about it. EVERYTHING in tech started with some sort of piracy, of music, of web content, of videos, of books, of hotels, of taxis, it's persistently the right strategy. And that's good, the world can't hang onto gatekeepers forever.

From what I can tell, Chinese companies will freely steal technology from other countries and companies, which is obviously frustrating and not great, but then they relatively quickly start exceeding the technology they stole, quickly adding features not present in the original products. So it's a bit dangerous for American companies to sit on their heels saying Chinese companies are stealing. Yes, they are, and it's frustrating, but then those Chinese companies add features at a rapid pace that the American companies can seemingly not keep up with.

I'm not sure how many Chinese HN users we have...but I'd personally love to see them chime in occasionally on this topic.

My personal experience/conclusions drawn from business, experiences in grad school etc. (so obviously not worth much and poorly sourced from a data perspective) are that certain seemingly obvious concepts like "cheating" or "stealing" are just fundamentally understood differently and not ingrained in a Western compatible way culturally in China. There seems to be deep differences there that manifest in all kinds of ways.

I'm not sure it's part of personal or societal culture. The Chinese people I know, granted who are all highly educated and also some of the nicest people I know period, do not abide by this culture of stealing/copying and find it as frustrating as anyone. So in my opinion, it's more of an economic and possibly state-driven culture.

Bunnie Huang [1] has written/spoke on this topic. I think he mentions it in the Shenzen documentary [2]. Quote from the documentary page:

> We examine the unique manufacturing ecosystem that has emerged, gaining access to the world’s leading hardware-prototyping culture whilst challenging misconceptions from the west. The film looks at how the evolution of “Shanzhai” – or copycat manufacturing – has transformed traditional models of business, distribution and innovation, and asks what the rest of the world can learn from this so-called “Silicon Valley of hardware".

1: https://www.bunniestudios.com 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY

"Stealing" and "cheating" was also the US way before it became the top dog. Intelectual property on patents has always been used as a tool for the current world powers to try to cement themselves as permanent world powers. But it doesn't work, other countries are also sovereign, and they don't have to respect US laws made to create US monopolies.

Most of the accusations about IP theft don't even involve actual registered IP. The fact that users on HN repeatedly fall into this pit shows how much the discussion has deteriorated on what's supposedly a platform less saturated with junk info like mainstream forums.

Well, can IP be stolen? It is a state-protected monopoly. If you steal my IP, we both have these IPs.

Using the word "stealing" is fundamentally wrong about intellectual creations.

What frustrating me more is that Roborock cannot use the double-roller design iRobot has due to patents.

I think if a culture finds out that doing a particular thing benefits it greatly, and that it cannot be punished for doing that thing... it will do that thing.

This idea of "cultural differences in the idea of stealing" is a bit silly. It's based on self-reports of the people who are stealing, and making massive amounts of money from the theft. Rationalizations, in other words.

In all honesty, if I could "steal" from a culture with a far superior level of technology without repercussion, in order to sell products mainly within my own culture, I'd do it too. It's still a benefit to the whole group, isn't it? The same story plays out every time this power dynamic comes up, and in far more varied patterns than people talk about (e.g. Japan "stealing" transistor designs to start its electronics giants, with the cooperation of a few Americans but still against moral values).

On this note it’s always useful to reflect upon the era where the US also had a cultural acceptance of “stealing” technology from the UK, since America wasn’t always such a tech leader.

Also the story goes that the Wild West was so famous for not enforcing Edison’s patents, an entire industry formed to take advantage: Hollywood.

No sane human being would willingly step into an openly hostile environment to share their genuine opinions when there is a very obvious risk of being dehumanized, dismissed, and viciously attacked with but not limited to slurs and abusive wording, Chinese or otherwise.

Every major English-speaking social media/web forum has been embroiled with open hatred towards everyone and everything Chinese regardless of context or politics for more than a half decade by now.

> quickly adding features not present in the original products. So it's a bit dangerous for American companies to sit on their heels

Why can't American companies study the Chinese products and do the same in turn?

Do American companies manufacture anything in China? Yes. Do Chinese companies manufacture anything in USA? No.

So USA can only watch, while China can actually steal.

Do you need to see manufacturing processes to steal features? Is it not possible to reverse engineer a lot of it?

In the car industry, it's standard practice for every company to buy every model from every other company to study it.

It still is easier to copy, when you own manufactiring process.

They already do, see facebook/tik tok

Perhaps because there has been nothing worth stealing there, and hence a culture of “stealing” never appeared. This might change of course, if/when China starts pumping out radically superior products.

In Chinese culture, copying (I would not use the word "stealing") symbolizes respect for a product and has roots in Confucianism (however, let's avoid potential exploitation of this). But don't forget that Americans behaved similarly in the 19th century [1], and Brits did the same to Dutchs. So I guess this is a common pattern for raising powers.

[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/12/06/we-were-pirates-too/

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery is the go to argument here? And it wouldn’t be complete without 200 year old whataboutism. I am unimpressed.

This pathetic point always gets brought up when talking about China's IP theft, but it should be telling that it is literally one individual from 200+ years ago who is always mentioned.

What did he do? He worked in a factory and memorized details about the machines, and then went to America and rebuilt them.

Is that what Chinese companies are doing? Do they get someone hired at the company, who then memorizes things, and then goes back to China and rebuilds them?

No one would care if China was operating the way Slater operated. That is common even with Americans moving from one American company to another. What is not common is directly stealing designs and schematics and billions of bits of other information through nefarious means, by breaching a company's cyber security or infiltrating their supply line.

The truth is, Chinese companies don't have any need to directly copy Western designs, certainly not anymore. They have the factories and ecosystem to rapidly design and build new products with a high level of quality and precision.

I wanted to work in the US designing hardware with my Computer Engineering degree, but I couldn't even find a job doing that. Now I'm in B2B software like everyone else.

In a lot of cases, Western companies go as far as outsourcing the entire design process to China. Entire consumer product categories are just white labeled Chinese designs.

We are long past the point of China doing some crude copy and pasting. It isn't Soviet Russia making exact copies and producing poor quality facsimiles. The West needs to stop thinking of China's economic might as something that was only acquired by "cheating."

This is where we are at: Huawei has better image processing software than Apple. Roborock has more features and a more intelligent robot vacuum than iRobot. TikTok is better than Instagram or Facebook. BYD sells more EVs than Tesla. Which Western company makes an off-street EV utility vehicle with a dump bed, air conditioning, and infotainment like this one?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bixJDOH864U

This isn't really at all about China "copying" or "stealing" Western IP, because Chinese products are quite often better than Western ones at lower prices.

The idea that China isn't its own R&D powerhouse is, at this point, an insult to the individuals who are creating all of this stuff.

Sadly I think this is just encouraging US companies to make products that phone home, and require a service contract. It's much harder to copy that part, and more lucrative.

I bet when Neato found out about this they immediately almost moved production to a country with adequate labor protections and IP laws. Almost.

I was at iRobot for holiday season 2003; 1st gen Roomba was out, MANY of the returns piled up along the hallways of HQ.

One day the "director of sales"? walked into the standup meeting like Vince McMahon into the arena and slammed down this robot onto the coffee table that was a pitch-perfect copy of the Roomba, except it was tea green and had more colorful LEDs and sounds. "F this and F that" like we had any ability to stop that from happening. I did the teardown and it was a near-perfect mechanical copy like somebody walked the molds across the street. The PCB was different where they chose cheaper connectors. It was way prettier looking IMO. What they couldn't copy was the logic; the SW/uC was handled through a different chain so unless you literally stole a pile of programmed parts, you'd be on your own. The Roomba development team consoled themselves that the performance of floor coverage of this knock-off was worse than the original...but to be frank, both were only useful under limited circumstances that I found nobody I knew had. I'd have better luck with an old sweep-broom.

As an intern, those returns piling up were so they wouldn't get resold elsewhere or scavenged. And there were a LOT of returns; its a complicated design with a LOT of cables and connectors and some marginal components going out of the expected tolerances. One of my jobs was to strip out the batteries, lay these robots out in the back parking lot, and using a pointed steel rod, 'spear-fish' them to render them unusable. To make my work quick I'd aim for the 'brain' - the middle where the case was thin and I'd bust through the microcontroller part of the main PCB. Aim, 'crunch', make sure I 'killed' it, and then fling it into the dumpster. Nearly 20 years on, I fondly remember thinking 'I can't believe I get paid to do this!'

Wow that last bit sounds like the start of a SF novel about robot uprising. Thanks for sharing your story!

they'll come for him first, try him at the Hague :')

I don't think this one will get a trial.

Reverse engineering is legal, e.g., the Compaq Portable, which was a much better value than the IBM PC.

That type of engineering that Compaq performed was very specific clean room reverse engineering or clean room design, which is specifically designed as a defense against copyright infringement because it relies on independent creation by going off the specification (in Compaq case the Bios specification) and not the original design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

Huh? Why wouldn't they have gone off IBM's design? It seems extremely likely they would have had several copies in their 'clean room'.

Because going off IBM's design would have been illegal. It's one of the most famous and well documented reverse engineering projects ever, and they had no copies of the IBM Bios in their clean room because otherwise it would have been illegal. That's literally what clean room reverse engineering means.

> 'they had no copies of the IBM Bios in their clean room because otherwise it would have been illegal' According to who?

Right, and that's where I question whether the "clean room" is something that is morally necessary.

If it's okay to copy something in the legal way that Compaq did it, why is it not legal to skip the clean room and just copy a design?

I don't mean espionage and actual stealing of code/schematics (I don't think many Chinese companies engage in that, contrary to the perception). I mean, the company buys the product, inspects it, then copies it.

If Compaq had done that directly, it would have been illegal, but the outcome would have been the same as the clean room design.

I question the merits of having that level of copy protection where reverse engineering is only legal in a specific and arbitrarily convoluted way. To me it seems like that idea might encourage monopolies and higher prices for everyone.

I wonder if Amazon actually cares about cleaning robots, or if they're after the data roomba collects? https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/28/16055590/roomba-wont-sell...

Schema of your property, number of people living there and times where no one is at home is definitely useful for amazon.

And for burglars.

I assume you're talking about the kind with a badge. Normal criminals don't get access to Amazon's info before entering a house.

Maybe I'm just paranoid, but it's only a matter of time until Amazon's data is leaked and sold on the black market. Correlate house layout, number of residents and their schedules, plus income bracket (from another source, possibly also from Amazon), and it's a blueprint for burglars looking for an easy score in an upper-middle class neighborhood.

Your take reminds me of https://xkcd.com/538/

Don't forget to filter out homes that didn't buy an alarm system off Amazon

You don't need to go to the black market. You can look up the property at the county (or whatever) clerk's office or look at satellite imagery and get a pretty good approximation.

A ton of things are public information to a greater or lesser degree whether you like it or not.

People who rob upper-middle class homes are not going to do so because they have a house layout in advance. They're just going to rob the house. And anybody who goes to the lengths of buying Amazon data on the black market is not going to be interested in stealing people's laptops and jewelry.

I think that's a bit naïve, considering how common it is to see modern tech and basic/traditional crimes intersect - from ATM card cloning, to using Tor+cryptocurrencies for buying drugs, car key fob hacking, etc.

Sure the people who currently buy data on the black market won't all start robbing houses, and the people currently robbing houses won't all start buying illegal data to help their burgling.

But as long as the economics make sense (and it likely would - once someone has a bunch of useful data that they want to sell illegally, they'll lower the price until it is worth being bought by people), some burglars definitely will start adding more intelligence to their planning including using black market data leaks for picking houses to target and for how/when to rob them, what items to look for, etc.

And potentially you also get other people for whom burglary wasn't a feasible option before, but combined with this new tool might be. Personally I'm not going to become a burglar for ethical reasons, but for the sake of a hypothetical let's pretend that I have no ethics whatsoever and think that stealing is a fantastic idea as long as I can avoid getting caught. I still wouldn't rob houses, because it would seem like quite a risky way of making money, and with each big risk taken there's a fair chance of not even finding anything particularly valuable once you've broken into a house.

But if I could buy data leaks that I trusted which told me which houses to rob to find the best ROI items (high value, easy to carry, and maybe even located thanks to the camera of a robot vacuum), and also told me when people would be home and would be asleep.... well maybe my hypothetical no-ethics self would still find a better crime to commit, but it'd be a hell of a lot more tempting to become a burglar than without all that data!

Do you really think there haven't already been crimes committed that involves basic dumb theft but where the targets were chosen based off a leaked list of car purchases, or jewellery shop customers, or...? And not just in the era of digital data theft, go back a thousand years and I'd assume there were some "crimes of opportunity" committed not on a whim but thanks to planning enabled only by the studying of information they shouldn't have been in possession of.

The schema of your property is already publicly available in home schematics records, and they already have your address to look up.

I think Occam's Razor applies here. iRobot is a profitable smart home product maker, their revenue/profit has continuously grown, and their IP + talent will allow Amazon to expand into other smart home verticals.

Yes it's possible to lookup the schematics but completely impractical at Amazon's scale.

If home schematics were actually a thing they cared about (and I'm skeptical of even that premise), then at Amazon's scale, they could make it easy to achieve at their scale.

It is a totally different proposition to go and often manually lookup and harvest building floorplan data from town/city archives than to passively collect the same data floorplan data generated by devices in their ordinary operation.

The former is not scaleable in any reasonable way and every operation is an ADDITIONAL cost, whereas the latter is generated for the products' main purpose and you merely add some storage for the harvested data. Moreover, the generated data will be much more up-to-date (plenty of renovations or updates happen without building permits, legally or not).

I think experience has shown us time and time again that the following forms are misapplications of Occam's Razor:

- business decision X isn't (in part) motivated by the intention to exploit the incidental access to data a product class brings

- data class Y seems worthless/redundant, they wouldn't make a business out of it

Scans of people's home layout definitely wouldn't be worthless, I just don't think that's the main motivator of the acquisition.

It’s not the home layout so much as the habits that data uncovers. Access to peoples homes is the holy grail and especially so in amazons case. Whereas the Alexa gives Amazon audio from inside, and ring gives them video and audio from outside, this would take things a step further. You have the obvious data like in and outs, bedtimes, house schedules (kitchen to living room, living room to bedroom, bedroom to bathroom trips) but it can also get more granular and even more so with LiDAR and image recognition. Imagine a vacuum that knows which brand of shoe you wear and size of feet you are, which can then identify if a new pair shoes up on its next scan (same size? Oh this person bought a new pair of shoes. Different size? Oh this person is potentially in a relationship now.)

These are all key data points which Amazon drools over.

The locations of walls and doors, yes. Your furniture and other stuff, no. Having a "man on the inside" able to tell whether that third bedroom is being used as an office or a nursery could be of value to a company deciding whether to advertise child care products or office supplies. Hell just giving a heads up that a household is in the market for a big ticket item like a couch could be quite valuable.

My robot vacuum sits docked away from me, on a separate floor, during the day. It runs at night time and I never see it. It's connected to its own IOT network. How would it know how many people live in my home and when I'm not there?

Roomba uses cameras which don’t work at night. If you run it in the dark it gets stuck. At least the 960.

Shoes/slippers, number of toothbrushes, coats/jackets, beds. Yes, they do have cameras and call home. Opsec is hard.

And now realize Chinese brands of cleaning robots have build in full detailed mapping (lidar/camera/ai), and do call home.

Not to mention the location of valuables, security cameras (other than Ring, as they can just turn those off), any security dogs or cats. How do you think Jeffrey Beesoz got so rich?

Amazon definitely cares about automated appliances (as demonstrated by their warehouse automation)

At this point a company is going to need to produce a "deceased cubicle human detection" robot for the few holdouts 40 years from now.

Warehouse automation is a completely different ballgame to consumer, though.

If an Amazon warehouse can replace a $20,000/year human with a Kiva robot, they're happy to pay $10,000 for it. Consumers, on the other hand, would find $500 on the steep side for a robot vacuum, considering they'll also need a regular vacuum to cover the stairs and so on.

Consumers' price sensitivity is why Roomba spent years with a plastic product navigating at random by bumping into things and relying more on a brush than a vacuum.

I think your numbers are a bit off. The base Amazon warehouse worker is closer to 35-40k all in cost. And the $700-$900 roombas sell very well.

I'd expect they'd pay even 2-3x that easily since a robot can work 24/7. The squishy humans need to pee, or worse go home.

there's a loose correlation of concerns there, but "definitely"? More like "likely."

> Amazon definitely cares about automated appliances (as demonstrated by their warehouse automation)

This is almost equivalent to saying that Boeing cares about paper planes because they make airliners.

I once attended a Foxconn seminar presented by Jay Lee where the topic was "dark warehouses"; certainly wouldn't be surprised if Amazon has a strong desire to reach that level of machine autonomy in their own warehouses.

Amazon probably cares most about getting all the robot making talent and capability they can for a wide range of robotic needs they have/will have.

Amazon Robotics has been actively poaching talent from iRobot already, but I think it's probably a little of everything: talent, data, and the bump they can give to iRobot sales.

Roomba already makes bots that carry around pallets in a warehouse so your point makes sense.

It's also possible that iRobot owns patents related to technology Amazon is planning to use. Besides brush/cleaning-related patents, iRobot owns the rights to several techniques used to map and zone a space.

I guess data is one part, but I see this as a smart home eco-system play, that integrates well into their Alexa thing.

Looking at the reviews for spare parts for my model i7, i hope amazon gets rid of the crap replacements, but equally lowers the extortionate prices on the official, various, eu website(s).

Apparently iRobot is going to Amazon Devices and not Amazon Robotics, but who knows if they'll silently transfer a lot of that knowledge/talent after the acquisition

I would imagine they'd want to combine Amazon Astro (the home robot) and Roomba's cleaning tech.

Create an all-in-one Alexa robot.

I've always wondered how iRobot hasn't been more successful. They have a cool name, brand recognition, first-mover advantage. It's been nearly 20 years since their IPO. I would have expected by now that robots would have taken over more household cleaning tasks, but it doesn't seem like the technology has improved much in the past two decades.

I gave up on my roomba because it would always get stuck in something before it could finish cleaning. I now use a Dyson stick vac.

Maybe they were so successful that some MBA decided to maximize shareholder value by cutting on superfluous R&D?

That seems to be the Neato story right now.

The technology has come a long way in these years and the modern models are pretty good devices. I use a Miele canister vac for the deep cleans but I also have a Eufy and a Roborock robot vaccum, one does the random bouncing and the other uses LIDAR to map and clean intentionally, and they're both great. I run them several times a week and the amount of stuff they pull out of the carpet, rugs and off the hard floors is incredible. I would never bust out the Miele several times a week.

They lost because the competition is better. Roborock and Ecovacs are superior devices to any of iRobots' offerings.

Their robots started to suck after a while ! They are more interested in extracting more from their customers than creating better robots. Best example is their mopping robot that they try to market using a kind of "subscription" model with proprietary pads. The chinese roborock is so much better and they get better after each release.

> The chinese roborock is so much better and they get better after each release.

Are you buying multiple robots over time?

Christ, and here I am thinking $1000 CAD is a lot of money.

Selling stuff you no longer use is a thing. Not everyone just throws stuff out, or donates to goodwill.

I will keep the roborock for a while as it seems to be mature enough and checks all/most of the boxes. I sold the old robots for 59-60% of their value. The reasons for my upgrade path was: better nav, mopping and self cleaning.

Roborock does all 3, the 3rd is not perfect so I guess I will upgrade it once more (after 2 more iterations to make sure they fix properly)

Their mopping robot was an extreme letdown. We bought the nicer one and it has such a tiny tank that it can't clean my downstairs without needing refilling halfway through.

Plus any cleaning solution besides theirs breaks the robot. Plus the cleaning pad it uses to mop needs to be replaced after every run Plus it's a lot more aggressive than the regular roomba and slams itself into things, knocking all kinds of things over.

The cleaning solution is very expensive. The pads have DRM and are very expensive. The robot is very expensive.

Thanks to all it's drawbacks it's not really able to be automated. So you wind up with a mop that you still have to manage, direct to run, and feed expensive soap and cleaning pads. In reality, I have the robot, and it's been plugged in for 4+ years and probably not been ran for 3+ years.

I have mine dry mop to keep the dust down rather than wet mopping every day. It's much less work than wet mopping, I just need to change the pad once a week.

It still takes a long time to mop and gets stuck more often than my i7 but it's mostly hands free.

> Their robots started to suck after a while !

I dunno, I would hope they started to suck right out of the box.

(Old MS joke...)

It's a funny joke if you're making a pun on its vacuum function being "sucking", but if you're just using it as a joke that applied to Microsoft then you're not using the pun and just making an almost-joke of "their product is bad".

I'm making a pun, just as the MS joke used the same pun.

For people who don't know, the joke is"

"What is the only product that MS can make that won't suck?"

"A vacuum cleaner."

Fair enough, my bad!

Yeah I had a Roomba 10 years ago. It was starting to age a bit (still working! but would always get stuck). So I was thinking.. it's been a decade.. time to buy a new model, surely they improved!

Nope, nothing is better, absolutely nothing. The "AI" (if we can call it that) to vacuum hasn't improved one bit. It somehow seems so suck a lot less on the carpet than the previous one. It's somewhat better to manage my cat's hair, but that's about it. Sure now I have wifi on it, to re-start it because it often stops too early before it's done. But nothing, no improvement in 10 years.. in ROBOT TECHNOLOGY!

Watch vacuum reviews on Vacuum Wars channel, tons of innovation, mostly not with Roombas though

https://youtube.com/c/VacuumWars/videos

Same experience. Bought a Roomba in 2008 and didn’t like it much. Bought another in 2021 and was shocked at how little it had improved in that time. It’s better, but not by much. And clearly behind the technology in some of the Chinese vacs.

It's hard to compete with China. Willing to live on lower margins, more r&d, and cheaper cost to do r&d.

> cheaper cost to do r&d.

Is this a euphemism for outright IP theft?

They are ahead of the US when it comes to robot vacuums.

This is a simplistic view of IP theft. The Chinese are much more advanced. Steal from Roomba at the beginning. Surpassed Roomba? Steal something from BMW that's secret Lidar navigation work. Steal something from Samsung for circuit design, steal something from Tesla, steal something from Mobileeye, etc.

I meant cheaper engineers.

Also faster iteration. Back in my mechanical engineering days, we'd design prototypes and then have to wait months for them to come in (of course they were built off-shore).

Doing it onshore was difficult (few could handle our requests, or they were exorbitantly expensive and couldn't scale, and terrible quality control.)

Thus we'd take a long, long time to work out design issues. A Chinese company can iterate much faster because of this.

It wasn't just China. Roomba was really slow to move mapping technology into their lower end products. There was a lot of reputational damage done by making mediocre products their primary volume sellers.

Well it's more about how much does the state invest. That's how innovation exist (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State)

Leaving specifics of Roomba vs. competitors aside, the basic concept just doesn't work well in a lot of situations. My house ends up having a bunch of cords and clutter. And even on the "single level" ground floor which is fairly open and fairly heavily trafficked, there are a number of small level changes between rooms because of additions over time.

I'm with you. I considered a Roomba a few years back but came to the conclusion that a Dyson cordless vac essentially solved my problem by making it trivial to spend a few minutes pulling out and running a vac as opposed to hauling out a canister vac between housecleanings.

My brother, on the other hand, has dogs and has a newly constructed single level house that they keep pretty free of clutter. A robo-vacuum works pretty well for them.

I've always felt like these products were mainly designed for people who live in single-level small-ish apartments, but then it's confusing because manually vacuuming those isn't very hard either. I just don't understand the market.

It's mostly my kitchen/dining room/"mudroom" area that can use regular quick vacs between full housecleanings. But looking right now I have some shoes and other things scattered around and it's literally about 3 minutes to do a touchup with my Dyson stick vac which has been great.

It's for wealthy people who have large homes with large open spaces. People who have enough storage that they don't have clutter on the floor.

I grew up next to a neighborhood of 5000sf+ homes, and I never saw clutter in any of them. Some of them had house cleaners, but even the ones that didn't, they had storage everywhere, so everything got put away. A Roomba on every floor would be perfect for them.

I moved away before Roomba existed, but I imagine a lot of them have it.

I'm sure there's some correlation between wealth/space and lack of clutter. But my observation is that some people are just much more inclined not to leave a lot of loose things either on floors or table. I'm pretty sure I could have a house that was twice the size and it would still look very lived in.

I have a large home with large open spaces and little clutter on the floor. But I'd need something like 8 Roombas to cover it all because of the changes in levels, doors that are normally closed, etc.

Also, as a semi-wealthy person with a large home, I hire people to clean it including vacuuming, and I don't need an annoying robot roaming the house to do it.

Newer robots from companies iterating on the technology, like Roborock, can detect cables/shoes/stuff left on the floor and just drive around them. They're a lot better than what Roomba is selling, and much better at dealing with the average home. I've been really impressed with ours after having a similar, frustrating experience with one from iRobot.

This is accurate. Their competitor, the Ecovacs Deebot, just push an OTA update making cable detection way better. In a way the previous comment encapsulates all the misconceptions about robovacs. I was recently surprised to learn how good they are because my only basis for comparison was my friend's failure of a Roomba that's always getting into shenanigans.

Right–that's what I found so weird about the Amazon acquisition of iRobot is that Roombas are clearly a few generations of technology behind their competitors like Neato, Ecovacs and Roborock...but they must have a bunch of similar technology currently under development and on the way to market. What Roomba does have is name recognition, which seems to mean that most people think that robot vacuums aren't very good–I suspect Amazon sees they get tons of sales on their platform, has a good R&D team/patents, and smells an opportunity to own the space by pouring money into it and helping them compete (and, of course, putting them to the top of Amazon results, as they always do).

horrible execution most likely..... the lawn mowing robot has been a joke internally since 2011

I wonder how much of it is also people like me. I work in tech, but I despise single-purpose household "gadgets." I have a vacuum cleaner and a set of working eyes. I can clean the floor in 5 or 10 minutes, rather than having a "robot" roaming the room randomly, bumping into things, and making noise for an hour. When I'm done, I store it away in a closet and don't have to look at an unsightly lump of plastic parked in a charging station. Bottom line, these cleaning robots don't solve any problem that I have, and they make my home less enjoyable to be in.

As far as I can tell, first-mover advantage is a myth. The most successful products seem to rarely be the first to market.

Well … time to get rid of my roomba.

The idea that they’ll have ring outside, a camera inside monitoring every movement is kinda nuts, and Alexa monitoring all audio is insane. We already know Amazon has a service to sell data to police. I don’t know what people will expect here.

We elect our true leaders with each of our purchases, and our ballot is every receipt we get

It's interesting because I would totally go for that if I could run all of the services locally with some digital assistant AI to tie it together and manage them. It's tragic, really. The cool future I imagined is here but there is a catch. There's always a catch.

Could you elaborate more on "We already know Amazon has a service to sell data to police" statement?

It's plain not true, Amazon has shared information with the police, but they don't make money from it. It's also not large-scale with only 11 requests in 2022.

There are plenty of reasons to dislike Amazon, no need to invent one:

> Ring says it will only "respond immediately to urgent law enforcement requests for information in cases involving imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to any person." Its policy is to review any requests for assistance from police, then make "a good-faith determination whether the request meets the well-known standard, grounded in federal law, that there is imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to any person requiring disclosure of information without delay."

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/07/amazon-finally-a...

Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without owner consent - https://theintercept.com/2022/07/13/amazon-ring-camera-foota...

Google, like Amazon, may let police see your video without a warrant - https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/26/23279562/arlo-apple-wyze-...

Yes, the link I shared is from the same story. My point is that they aren't using it to sell ads.

The original claim in this thread wasn’t related to adverts, it was that data was sold to the police. Isn’t the reality worse, they just give it to the police?

Here’s a direct request

https://ler.amazon.com/us

Here’s an article from Gizmodo

https://gizmodo.com/ring-s-hidden-data-let-us-map-amazons-sp...

> Neighbors, which has millions of users, is advertised as a way to receive “real-time crime and safety alerts” from local law enforcement and other Neighbors users nearby. A Ring camera isn’t required to use the app. In cities where police have partnered with Ring, police officers have access to a special law enforcement portal, through which the officers can request access to Ring footage. They can choose a date, a time, and a location on a map, and Neighbors users with cameras in the vicinity are alerted.

>It's also not large-scale with only 11 requests in 2022.

We should definitely take Amazon at their word here. Such a trustworthy company should be given the benefit of the doubt. We don't need to be able to audit these claims. Amazon said it, and therefore it is fact!

Absolutely every American company that get a legal request for data from law enforcement will comply. Small companies don't make the news the way Amazon does, but if robot vacuums have ever collected evidence of a crime, then I guarantee iRobot has been issued and complied with requests for data too. Police routinely collect security camera footage from small businesses. Nobody is immune to due process.

How long do folks think until this will lead to actual change within what's now iRobot? Am I naive to assume nothing really will change in the next year or two? I just bought this thing a year ago. It's frustrating to think it's now part of the Amazon data collection system.

I wonder if there'll be a way to sever the device from the cloud and use it through HomeAssistant exclusively. As far as I know it is running an MQTT server but I have no idea how much it relies on the cloud to function.

I have heard from a former irobot employee that they were besieged by the same issues I had while working in consumer robotics: endless priority changes and lack of long term product vision. This is why their lawn mower robot apparently failed to launch

I feel like if a company just focused on the basics (ie reliable cleaning) instead of a bunch of different marketing gimmicks, it will work out long term.

> focus on the basics instead of marketing gimmicks

This reminds me of what Steve Jobs said about Xerox[0]. After achieving market leadership in their industry, engineering at iRobot seems to have been pushed aside in the company's decision making process.

Is this a consequence of being a publicly traded company? After all, pushing consumables and subscription services requires less capital and makes more money compared to developing a better robot. The $1.7B exit seems like a good outcome for a stagnant (relative to its peers) company.

[0] https://youtu.be/NlBjNmXvqIM?t=56

I ran into this issue even in a private company. Hardware takes a long time, and I think leadership doesn't realize how hard it actually is do get the basic functionality done RELIABLY. That is - having a demo of a working lawn mower / vacuum cleaner / whatever is fairly easy (I've seen Arduino based projects online), but having it work in variety of settings and conditions without user intervention for years takes a very long time to work out the bugs.

I think over time leadership gets frustrated with seemingly lack of progress on the foundation, while efforts to change the high level features (app, smart home integration, GPS, etc) distract from the core product. Just my 2c

Now we wait for the cameras and microphones. Gotta hand it to Bezos, they're building a solid fleet of home espionage devices. The modern trend of replacing everything with smart devices reminds me, ironically, of the movie "I, Robot." I wonder how long it'll take for a corporation to go rogue and lock the country down. Maybe not now, or even in 20 years. But they have a lot of power.

Imagine that. A corporate-run national coup, all thanks to people's laziness.

I just bought a roomba and was happy that they weren’t owned by Google or Amazon. This is unfortunate.

I owned nests before Google bought them and it was sad to both see their innovation decline (basically the same now as 8 years ago) and usability decline (forcing Google logins).

Time to do what I did to every hardware product I owned which Google acquired: Rip it out, delete my account, and try to make my money back selling it to someone else.

I actually made a profit on both my Nest and my Fitbit so far! Though the Nest was from energy rebates before I resold it, and the Fitbit was from it's recall for burn risk... Recall paid MSRP, not the price I purchased it for.

I have two Nest-E devices in the home and have not enabled Google login. If you can find the older versions of the thermostats, you can factory reset them, stick them on a guest network without internal access, and never use the Google login, just the old Nest login.

Not sure how long that'll stay like that, but it's doable at present.

I haven’t enabled Google login either but I get nagware from nest and Google asking me to.

I really like my nest and hope I can keep them for a long time.

I’m normally skewering how Google manages their physical products, but Tbf Nest declined due to mismanagement by Tony Fadel, one of the founders. Google gave Nest tons of money which didn’t lead to anything major materializing instead of delay after delay.

Fadell left Nest in 2016. Maybe the early stagnation can be blamed on him. But Google has had the reigns for 6 years and nest has really not done anything substantial.

On the one hand I am excited about this, on the other hand I am worried.

With Amazon's issues around Ring I am worried about the privacy side of this. So how they handle that will remain to be seen.

But I also see iRobot struggling with the innovation aspect on the home side of things.

Especially when it comes to the quality and price point of their robots compared to the competition. If amazon takes some of their more price conscious approach to iRobot (or more justified the cost compared to competition) I think that would be great.

Personally I went with iRobot for my last vacuum after constant struggles with lidar robots just being ineffective for home. They can't handle things moving around like they do at home. But I can't ignore that as a vacuum it is not as good as what I had before and cost twice as much.

FTC just blocked FB from buying a VR app. Will be interesting to see if this gets through. Very little roomba to maneuver in this regulatory environment. I'll see myself out.

We can only hope. The FTC and SEC have been largely absent in the 21st century. We need the CPC to start taking priority over stock price and the market.

> FTC just blocked FB from buying a VR app.

No, the FTC filed a lawsuit to attempt to stop the deal, despite the fact that FTC staff recommended against it.[1] The suit is a political sideshow.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-29/ftc-s-kha...

Opening my first Roomba was a great experience. Once you open the box there's a paragraph saying how "this is your Roomba, enjoy doing what you want with it. There's documentation online on using the diagnostic serial port to control your Roomba". This and how iRobot still sells all parts for all of their robots all the way back to the original made me find them to be the better company even if their innovation wasn't as competitive.

Ah dang. Will make me think twice about updating my roomba in the future. I was already a bit iffy on having one. but with how the sensors are and the kind of company iRobot was, I thought I could live with it. And I'll definitely never buy an Amazon produced robotic vacuum.

Kind of ironic that those most invested in technology are about to turn Amish.

I could have written paragraphs about my reluctance to appliance tech but there's a twit that sums it up for me perfectly:

https://nitter.it/ppathole/status/1116670170980859905?lang=e...

Yes, this is very sad news. No more Roombas in my future. At least there are a number of reasonable alternatives, though.

Outside your home with Ring, inside our wallets with the credit cards, inside our home with Echo and now Roomba and then controlling it all with Alexa.

How far away are we from a future where Amazon uses roomba/alexa to inspect what we need, what we're missing, and then just ship it to us and charge it on the card?

using a Roomba to track inventory seems strange but the idea of automatically shipping me what I need instead of a time based subscription sounds wonderful

They sort of have something that kind of does that. https://www.amazon.com/Dash-Smart-Shelf/dp/B07RV6X8LZ

That sounds like too much work. Better move to one of those new Amazon Human Farms(TM) that offer the amazon way of life for only $1999/mo

Its unfortunate that there seems no way to use any kind of home automation without spying.

Vacuum robots are pretty useful, but I don't want my home location, its map and many other details to be sent and used for advertising.

And it seems there is nothing like this, except maybe offline vaccum robots, which tend to be a lot more limited.

I had a roomba 10 years ago, before kids. With all the detritus that comes with kids, auto-vac was not a good option. Now that kids are older and we maintain some semblance of control over clutter I want to get one again. Any personal advice on what a good unit might be? Amazon or not.

I trust Vacuum Wars for technical reviews of vacuums and vacuum robots: https://youtube.com/c/VacuumWars

Looks like their big robot round up is about 9 months old, but they have single model reviews as well.

Edit: A little bit on why I like this review channel:

A lot of gadget reviews I read nowadays about household products are like "I like this robot it did a good job cleaning. Sometimes got stuck but not too bad."

Vacuum wars is like: "I worked 500 g of fine sand into our test carpet and ran the robot for 5 minutes. It picked up 362 g of sand which is 32% better than the average for this category and the best of the current robots that I've tried. Now, on the artificial hair test, the rotors tangled after just 50g which is a poor result for this category... "

He's set up a testing suite. He runs all of the vacuums through it. You can compare the results. It's how reviews should be.

I use both Roomba and Roborock in my house. Unfortunately that will be less Roomba going forward as I'm soured on the Amazon ecosystem.

I wholeheartedly recommend the Roborock devices. They're exactly where they need to be feature-wise and their app is workably okay. Very high WAF guarantees they'll always have a spot in the house.

Is there a robot vacuum that has mapping but doesn't require an internet connection? I know there are some projects to trick robots into working without internet, but I'm looking for one that actually just works.

There are some models that don't require internet and just kind of bump around the house, but they don't work well for multiple rooms. Would be nice if there was one that didn't require a cloud connection that will stop working some day.

I'm curious what is the correlation of robot vacuums' quality and internet connectivity? Is this just for firmware updates or is there some type of near-real time processing for these done in the cloud?

It's a good question, and I'm not sure I have a great answer. I suspect the main motivator (besides the obvious analytic data) is offloading storage to the cloud.

Look inyo Valetudo. Plenty of models supported, no cloud connectivity!

That’s sad to hear. I love iRobot because of their privacy stance, even if it means the tech is slightly behind Chinese companies.

With Amazon buying them, I have little hope that privacy ethics stay the same. Maybe time to move on to some other brand

Or a broom and dustpan, assuming you can find one without Wi-Fi.

I'm not a fan of Amazon or Chinese companies connecting things to the cloud that don't need to be.

What I liked about the Roomba brand is reparability. They actually make quite a few wear parts replaceable including wheels. However, I decided against for privacy as there was no way to block cloud access without losing functionality.

Since then I purchased a Dreamy Z10 Pro and have been very happy with a rooted and lobotomized from corporate cloud services using valetudo while retaining nearly all functionality and integrating with home assistant. https://valetudo.cloud/

With 3D printers nowadays, community should pull together to create an open source robot vacuum. There are a few out there but they're more like personal projects.

Very frustrating that all these smart devices keep getting acquired by big data hungry companies. Ring, Nest, Roomba… I like these toys because… well, I like toys, but I don’t like the idea that they can change owner after I buy them.

With Ring, Alexa and Roomba and Prime, it's pretty mind blowing how much a single corporation can know about a person's home life. I'm sure there are lots of people who will be consumers of all 4 of these things.

When Vorwerk bought Neato, products went downhill. I hope - and assume with Amazons tech understanding - this is not the case here (Here Xiaomi has replaced most appliances, e.g. air purifiers etc. and will be our next robot too).

I haven't found a reasonable solution for multi-level dwellings; interested in how others address this. If you just have 2 floors, it's reasonable to purchase 2 of these bots; but if you need a third, it starts to feel excessive. In something like a townhouse, with several floors that are individually not that big, for example. Not to mention I still need to clean all the stairs manually, and those are by nature high-traffic. Do folks move their bot to different floors weekly, or something like that?

The police will soon appreciate access to an interior diagram of your house and the number of people inside, along with the exterior Ring camera video feeds. For public safety of course.

Satellite overhead imagery + actual windows would give the cops enough to go on. Oh, and all the plans that are in the town hall. And my lawyer has a copy. A stakeout would give the number of people inside, as well as cellphone data a la stingray.

Yeah, but a roomba can debunk an alibi from last tuesday, and (as a bonus for prosecutors) probably isn’t great at avoiding mistaken identities.

Roomba vSLAM = camera in robots. No idea if they have filters (to blur out details) on the Roomba robots or not.

Alexa, where you are stuck now?!

This is great. I was wanting to get a Roomba, but it's too costly in India (the model that has the automatic dust collection thingy)

With Amazon buying it, perhaps they will make it available widely here.

On an other note, the day is not far off when Amazon not only controls the distribution, but slowly gobbles up the production as well, leading to a idiocracy esque one corporation to rule them all.

I expect this is to gain patents/technology around making autonomous robots, so that Amazon can create a warehouse system similar to Ocado, where robots, rather than people, pick groceries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKrcpa8Z_E

And what makes you think Amazon doesn't do that yet? Kiva systems did what Ocado does now a DECADE go. Amazon acquired kiva systems (infact, Amazon robotics was born out of this acquisition) long long ago and I'm sure can do a lot more than Ocado does now.

> And what makes you think Amazon doesn't do that yet?

Because I still see a lot of human beings employed picking things in Amazon warehouses.

Ring for the cameras outside your house. Roomba for the cameras rolling around the inside of your house.

Fwiw, they’re not buying Roomba for the tech. They’re buying it for the brand and the customer base.

Huh interesting to note that iRobot has a large Massachusetts presence. Another robotics acquisition from Amazon was also HQ’ed in Mass (Kiva). Interesting to see how far Amazon has expanded into the state (lots of AWS teams are based around seaport as well).

$1.7B is a remarkably low price given the amount of popular mindshare iRobot has.

They're getting eaten alive by competition though. Their first mover advantage has largely dissipated.

Amazon might be able to give them exactly the kind of capital injection they need to get back in front. Alternatively, they might end up just becoming a brand sitting on top of an OEM.

Time will tell!

That's a good point. They look like a premium-ish brand in a space that is rapidly becoming commoditized.

That's exactly where Amazon tends to do well with hardware.

I already wonder how people does accept alexa, google home, smart fridges, smart TV and smartphones overloaded with trackers. Now bots full of cameras and obviously connected to internet are coming.

Convenience. It’s the same reason many people will pick safety over freedom. I’m not making a judgement. It’s just an observation.

I see it more like the consumerism culture alimented with strong marketing that convince people there's something to gain while occluding any downsides: any individual or collective loss.

Like the loss of privacy or the pollution caused by a gadget industry relying on batteries, plastics, consumed power put together, [...].

You wouldn’t understand until you’ve used one on a daily basis. The marketing can only do so much if the products don’t actually deliver. They deliver

Marketing is a huge part of it as well. There are a lot of slick online and physical ads for these products. Heck, most of these devices were created by ad companies.

Here's a tangential thought I just had: One of the main selling points of robot vacuums is that they can work while you're away at work, so your house is magically clean when you get back.

Now that a bunch of people work from home, will the usefulness drop? If you're always home, when do you schedule the vacuum to run so it doesn't get in the way or make loud noises during a meeting? Or if you get the wet mopping model, when does it run so the floor has time to dry?

I WFH for the entire time I had my roborock. The sound is annoying, but I still run it every day. The main selling point for me is I don't have to vacuum.

Also covered here: https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/amazon-is-buying-irobot-fo...

https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/5/23293349/amazon-acquires-i...

Amazon will own your healthcare (one medical), your vacuum (irobot), the movies you watch (mgm, prime) and where you get your groceries (whole foods)

I am really sad to see this. iRobot's support is second to none in my experience. Their new vacuum that produces maps of the house and has a base station with a bag has been a delight. The parts aren't to expensive, the service is good, and they constantly improve my existing bot.

All of this, I'm sure, will go out the window along with a fear that my house will not become a well of data.

My floors are usually full of pieces of paper,cables and various other itens that prevent robot vacuums from working. I have a roomba S9, but I never use it because it requires a ton of manual work and supervision. Instead I just hire a cleaner a couple times a month. Are there any robot vacuums on the market currently that can handle a lot of mess on the floor?

I am in the same camp, my roomba is collecting dust (pun intended) in a corner. And they are so noisy and take so much time.

From furnitures that aren't compatible to kids leaving socks on the floor or the gf laptop charging cable or ... these things get stuck all the time. I bought back a regular vacuum cleaner and mop manually. It is not that big of a deal. Actually the floor is the easiest and fastest part when it comes to cleaning a house.

Eufy, Roborock, and ecovacs all have models with AI-driven obstacle avoidance that seems to work decently. There are a good number of youtube reviews that compare them.

I guess embedded microphones are the next thing to be added to these. It's for better voice control guys, nothing to see here.

Well dammit.

My wife and I do our best to avoid Amazon. It's just infuriating when something we already own and love becomes an Amazon product.

I mean they aren't just doing vacuums. And I wonder if there's some other tech there that Amazon is interested in.

For instance they have the "Root" and "Create" which is meant to teach coding and robotics.

https://www.irobot.ca/en_CA/root.html

I'm surprised that none of the comments mention iRobot's recent 50% stock decline, 30% drop in Q2 sales, or layoff announcement (10% of workforce).

I wonder how this deal would have gone down (if at all) had iRobot not encountered these headwinds.

I really do hope the technology to identify (chemically) what it is sucking up is not available because I can only imagine what Amazon could do with that information (well, other that send it to police without a warrant like Ring videos).

Macro lens + high frame rate camera + machine learning correlation of motion in wind tunnel?

Well there goes any reason to ever buy one.

Anyone working on FOSS 3D printable robot vacuums?

This vividly reminds me of "The Washing Machine Tragedy", a story in the "Memoirs of a Space Traveller" book by Stanisław Lem. Highly recommended to any fan of house automation.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the CHIPS Act. It seems like a good time to look around and see if you can acquire a company and somehow capture some (or more) of that funding.

I'm just going to put my tin-foil hat on for a second.

Not entirely sure how I would feel about Amazon having control over a machine full of sensors that can physically move around within my home.

Anyone have a link to a breakdown of iRobots revenue by product-type, business-unit, vertical, etc.?

Ask because I am curious how much of their revenue is consumers, industrial, military, etc.

It's all domestic now, and has been for some time.

> In April 2016, iRobot sold off its Defense & Security unit, with a new company being formed called Endeavor Robotics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRobot#Military_and_policing_r...

Which was then acquired by FLIR in 2019 - https://www.flir.com/news-center/press-releases/flir-systems...

Which was then acquired by/merged with Teledyne in 2021 - https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210514005348/en/Tel...

And I’m about to drop my Roomba on the second hand market.

Is 1X revenue good?

Depends which direction that revenue is going. Anyways multiples of profit is a better measure if the business is making money. After all you could have a multi-billion dollar company tomorrow selling gas for $1/gallon. but you'd also be losing $3-4 for every $1 you make. A pretty good analogy for many tech companies.

No. It is a sign that profits and profit margins are low and not expected to grow much anytime soon.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IRBT/irobot/net-pr...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IRBT/irobot/net-in...

Interesting. I do love my Roomba. I think they are very popular. I guess this will improve the Alexa integration.

Other home robots on the way I suspect?

Personally I'm looking forward to an Amazon home. Ring, Echo and Roomba – I will feel well taken care of and always safe.

oh no. How long until Amazon implements the house mapping tech iRobot got in trouble for even mentioning? [1]

[1] https://www.sciencealert.com/your-roomba-could-be-silently-m...

FTC says what? Why doesn't AMZN just buy a ride share company already to close the loop on data collection.

How do these cleaning bots handle corners? Do they have a way to reach them or they just skip them?

This feels like a mistake unless Amazon have a trick up their sleeves.

My experience with Roombas has been awful.

Not a huge number for this day and age. Household cleaning robots must be a low margin business.

For a device manufacturer? It seems like a pretty huge number to me. And for what these things sell for, pretty high margin, too.

I am not sure about dirt, but this will help Amazon collect a lot of data for sure

A ..formidable response to Tesla’s humanoid robot project.

Jordan Peterson voice: Hey Alexa clean my goddamn room

Can’t wait until I’m acquired by Amazon and integrated with Alexa

Oh my god, they're going to use them to sonar the interior of all of our homes.

“Check out this chest of drawers that would fit perfectly in that corner over there!”

Looks like others agree: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-05/amazon-s-...

Shout out to the HN down-voters.

Please NO! I don't want to have to get rid of my Roombas! I just bought a new one.

Robot scabs for the coming union wars in amazon warehouses. Kidding, but maybe that's the actual idea.

Amazon bought Kiva systems for 775 million a few years back to automate their warehouses with robotics. (the robots are the shelves...) I'm not sure how the automation is going, but they're definitely looking to automate as much as possible..

https://spectrum.ieee.org/amazon-acquires-kiva-systems-for-7...

This vividly reminds me of "The Washing Machine Tragedy", a story in the "Memoirs of a Space Traveller" book by Stanisław Lem. Highly recommended to any fan of house automation.

I have never been satisfied with roomba (granted, i got the basic-level devices). They re just not good and it seems there's loss of otential there. I m thinking to get a cheap xiaomi to give it a try

I expect the Amazon version to require wi-fi or cellular, will have microphones and cameras for “Alexa support”, and will automatically submit the stream to the police of what the Amazon operatives, sorry “operators”, deem sketchy. Remember kids if you live in a state where “it” is not legal, don’t let this thing vacuum up your shake; that’s evidence.

What will The monthly subscription fee to store your vacuum data in the cloud cost?

It’s a joke… Don’t ban me.

So, they are truly trying to map everything. Between ring, echo and now this, they're basically mapping 3/5 senses.

I'm willing to bet that they'll come up with some type of map service or jump in on the VR space.

This is a level of data gathering a government coud only dream of.

Is Amazon in the position where they have so much cash on hand that the most promising short-term growth strategy is for them to aggressively buy new companies? It seems like this is a model of growth for over-expansion —- or world domination along the lines of tech-campus states in Oryx and Crake.

They have their fingers in so many pies and realms of data that it seems like they are quickly becoming hegemonic data holders. They’re already expanding into healthcare, which chills me to my bone, beyond that they’ve basically covered every facet of the typical Westerner’s existence with no sign of stopping.

It’s high time for anti-trust laws on data, including the sharing and mass aggregation of data through and by intermediates.

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