Revisiting the original Roomba and its simple architecture

Summary

A couple of weeks ago, iRobot announced bankruptcy. The pathbreaking Boston-area company that makes the Roomba will now be owned by a Chinese consumer-goods manufacturer. People argue about who is to blame for the failure of iRobot: Was it poor management decisions? Government overreach in preventing mergers? An inability to innovate? The inevitable race to the bottom of any commodity consumer good? Regardless of the reasons, I am sad about one thing: that robot developers are missing what made the original Roomba successful. I will try to explain what made the design of the original Roomba truly innovative, and what lessons we should take from it. The Original Roomba Introduced in 2002, the Roomba was the first successful consumer robot for the home. Cheap, off-the-shelf components helped price this original Roomba at two hundred dollars so that people who needed a home vacuum could consider buying it. It worked well enough that iRobot eventually sold over forty million of them. Completely autonomous, the Roomba only needed to be switched on. It would run all over the floor, noisily brushing and vacuuming. When it was done, you emptied its dirt chamber and plugged it in to recharge. It had its limitations--- for example, it couldn't move furniture, confine itself to one area, or deal with carpet strings or wet messes. Its vacuum was anemic. But within these limitations, it could maintain the floor at an everyday level of cleanliness. This original Roomba was much simpler and more elegant than today's mobile vacuum cleaning robots, including iRobot's present models and many other competing products. In fact, its internal design was fundamentally different from most other robots. Greater than the sum Normally, industrial robots are made robust and safe by using high-quality, expensive parts that can execute programmed motions precisely, reliably, and repeatedly. The robots are then deployed into a carefully-designed, predictable environment, with safety systems built...