[HN Gopher] Revisiting the original Roomba and its simple archit...
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Revisiting the original Roomba and its simple architecture
Author : ripe
Score : 94 points
Date : 2026-01-03 04:53 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (robotsinplainenglish.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (robotsinplainenglish.com)
| ZiiS wrote:
| The modern vSLAM robots with mops and swing brushes for edges may
| seem ridiculously complex, but they do work well and a much
| cheaper than the original Roombas. I think this more proved that
| software is easier than hardware. (i.e. complex vSLAM is cheaper
| than a bigger battery needed for less optimal routing)
| drpixie wrote:
| > software is easier than hardware
|
| Software is certainly easier to replicate that hardware, 1M
| copies cost almost exactly the same as 1 copy :)
| lostlogin wrote:
| Risking this turning into some sort of 'Wired Top 5', but what
| is the go-to robot vacuum? My Roomba has become a hatefully
| little chaos monkey. The house small and has wooden floors, so
| it shouldn't be too tough.
| JamesSwift wrote:
| Just check out Vacuum Wars on YouTube to find the best based
| on your own criteria
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| I'm a fan of the roborock S8 (now the S10 i guess)
|
| It's a vacuum + mop combo which imo is way better for hard
| floors
| HPsquared wrote:
| Does it choose based on the surface, or just let both run
| all the time? (Mop on carpet doesn't sound ideal)
| baby_souffle wrote:
| They have an ultrasonic sensor to measure the type of
| floor and will not pump water when carpet is detected
| imp0cat wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz6U9QkXn5I Check this
| for a short overview of the available robovac mop
| technologies - modern roller mop equipped units have
| ultrasonic carpet sensors and will actually cover the
| entire mop to avoid getting carpets wet.
| Nihilartikel wrote:
| Seconding Roborock - we have a mid range one and it's
| effective and a huge step up in smartness from my old
| Samsung. I love being able to dispatch it to one or two
| different rooms and walk away knowing that it will get the
| job done.
|
| As a bonus, there are open source drop in replacements for
| the mfg's cloud service so you can self host your floor maps
| and stats, if that's your jam. (this isn't roborock exclusive
| though).
| forbiddenlake wrote:
| Can you link them?
|
| It's not valetudo is it?
| baby_souffle wrote:
| Anything valetudo supports is a good choice. Roborock has a
| semi official API that you can use to get ok levelers of
| integration with home assistant but valetudo is the gold
| standard.
| qazxcvbnmlp wrote:
| I think this was the missing piece from the article. The simple
| behaviors enabled interest in a market, but at the end of the
| day, the original Roomba didn't work well. It's cool to
| romanticize the simple behaviors, but like they miss things.
| fsh wrote:
| iRobot refused to incorporate LIDAR scanners, instead relying on
| some janky computer vision approach. Robots from Roborock and
| friends know their position with cm-accuracy at all times,
| whereas Roombas only have some vibe about which part of the
| building they are in. This makes them much less efficient at
| route planning and less reliable at adhering to exclusion zones.
| ramon156 wrote:
| Been meaning to try something like https://valetudo.cloud/ on
| my iRobot but I haven't checked out how hard it is.
| jasondjk wrote:
| It's not exactly easy but it is do-able if you have a
| compliant vacuum, order a pcb adapter and can boot a laptop
| into a recent Debian os to flash the firmware. Be careful
| what you say on the telegram group (I was banned for trying
| to buy a pcb instead of solder one).
| zero0529 wrote:
| I wasn't aware that it was possible on iRobot machines
| cuu508 wrote:
| There are no iRobot models in the Valetudo supported robots
| list.
| Semaphor wrote:
| I wish my Xiaomi X20+ was supported. I knew it wasn't when I
| bought it, but the price/capability alignment made me go with
| a dumb "smart" vacuum. There hasn't been an update in
| supported robots in almost 2 years, so I'm still holding out
| hope it will eventually be added when Dennis Giese gets bored
| and starts looking into stuff again ;)
| distances wrote:
| Another upside of LIDAR is that it isn't a camera. The robot
| sees a one-pixel 360 scan, which is quite enough for
| navigation, but doesn't have the privacy implications that come
| with an IoT camera device. I would not take a camera equipped
| vacuum even for free, and I think I'm not the only one.
| kolinko wrote:
| Did you ever own a any robot vacuum?
|
| Robots without cameras have an extremely difficult time
| distinguishing obstacles like cables etc on the ground.
| distances wrote:
| Yes, I've had an early random pattern robovac and a newer
| LIDAR equipped one. Both worked well enough, the LIDAR
| device obviously much better though.
|
| And yes, I keep the floors free of cables and clutter when
| it's vacuuming time. That isn't a hassle
| fullstop wrote:
| I have one, and specifically got one without a camera
| because I don't want that driving around my house. The
| first time it went through I made sure to stow cables and
| such, and I do a quick walk-through to make sure that none
| of the cats have barfed and that there's no obvious
| obstacles before I release the hypnodrone.
|
| It still saves me time, which was the reason that I bought
| it in the first place.
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| Sadly most new models have both camera and lidar. I can see
| the use of a camera for avoiding things like cables and pet
| poo, but I don't think it's worth is especially since all the
| robots are controlled via the cloud
| 1313ed01 wrote:
| What could possibly go wrong?
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i.
| ..
| hypercube33 wrote:
| Yeah this is really my perspective. They were king then refused
| to reprice or innovate when the market changed and I went with
| a Chinese brand that did mapping and mopping instead for less.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| I would reframe this as unable to rather than refused to.
|
| It's incredibly difficult in a successful business to change
| direction or even innovate.
|
| There's a bunch of guys in the engine room throwing coal into
| the furnace.
|
| There might be one or two lookouts shouting - but they are
| drowned out by the noise of the engines.
|
| If you're lucky there's a guy in the wheelhouse desperately
| spinning the wheel - but the connection between the wheel and
| the rudder is broken.
| pavlov wrote:
| _> "iRobot refused to incorporate LIDAR scanners, instead
| relying on some janky computer vision approach"_
|
| Reminds me of this one car company that sold me something
| called "FSD" that never worked. Hopefully they'll be bankrupt
| soon too.
| tokai wrote:
| But that was also a feature. No highres 3d scan of your home
| being phoned back to the producer.
| 05 wrote:
| > No highres 3d scan of your home being phoned back
|
| You should look at a teardown of one of those sensors. It's a
| 1D lidar (if you can even call it that, until recently all of
| those were not ToF but more triangulation/reflection angle)
| being spun, no high res scans of anything can be achieved
| using that tech :)
| imp0cat wrote:
| That's not entirely true. Roombas nowadays do come equipped
| with LIDAR. iRobot scrapped most of their in-house designs and
| instead chose to use generic OEM parts to build modern robots
| in 2025. And they are quite good.
| fullstop wrote:
| It's a little too late now, no?
|
| I wonder if they fell into a sunk cost fallacy with their
| camera-based approach.
| imp0cat wrote:
| Probably yes, but time will tell.
|
| Right now, their chinese OEM bought them and seems to be
| committed to keeping their robovacs alive.
|
| It is my understanding that US availability of the top
| models (such as 705 combo) may be limited, so here is a
| german youtube channel that has a lot of reviews of their
| newer units and compares them to the old ones (usually the
| S9 or 980, as those are the best units when it comes to
| vacuuming): https://www.youtube.com/@frickhelm/videos
| fullstop wrote:
| I'm guessing that the Chinese OEM bought them partially
| for the name itself, but mostly for their patents.
| systemtest wrote:
| That would be a dealbreaker for me. I don't want a mobile
| camera live-streaming the interior of my home to a Chinese or
| American cloud service. LIDAR is the only acceptable option for
| me. I'm OK with having a very rough 2D map of my home stored on
| a server somewhere.
| tguvot wrote:
| i have roomba with camera. it has no problem enforcing
| exclusion zone and does precise navigation decisions when it
| needs to move around
| jdlshore wrote:
| I have a Roomba with a camera. It navigates very well,
| including figuring out where it's at within seconds of being
| manually moved to a new location on a different floor.
| imp0cat wrote:
| I too have a Roomba with a camera (the 980) and I am mostly
| satisfied with it (after ten years I guess I got used to its
| quirks).
|
| I have also recently set-up the LIDAR-equipped 705 for my
| parents and let me tell you, there is no comparison.
|
| The navigation speed is greatly improved which means cleaning
| tasks take a lot less time. Furthermore, it works in complete
| darkness with no problems! The camera-equipped model just
| bumps into stuff randomly and then gives up when it's too
| dark.
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| It's not related to the engineering side of things, but the
| Roomba subreddit would ban people for mentioning anything
| negative about the product, such a great way to keep your product
| "successful".
| GardenLetter27 wrote:
| The entirety of Reddit is like that.
| expedition32 wrote:
| Daily reminder companies have social media teams.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| The entire internet is astroturfed and manipulated and full
| of bots and influence campaigns. Here included. Really not
| what I hoped it would turn into.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| It happens here I'm sure but, and maybe this I naive of
| me, I do not think we are seeing the organized, funded
| efforts like they see on Reddit. It's usually someone
| self promoting here in my experience. I'm sure it's
| happened but idk, it just doesn't seem like seem as
| coordinated and large scale. If it is well done y'all,
| you're hiding well!
|
| My experience with HN is people generally prefer to dog
| pile onto whatever was mentioned, say it is the worst
| option, then bicker with each other about all the
| solutions being proposed. I say bicker, but those threads
| can be great sources of info.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| i have never seen a subreddit about something that didn't
| turn into mostly hating that thing.
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| It's more like Roomba silenced their customers, disregarded
| and disrespected their opinions, and now financially
| bankrupt after said customers didn't buy their products.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Both of these things happened.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Reddit sure is a lovely place.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| It either turns into hating that thing or a place where
| mildly criticizing that thing gets you banned. Or a place
| where telling someone they're full of it as tactfully as
| you can still gets you banned or your post deleted for
| "incivility."
|
| Reddit is a weird place that is not real life.
| adolph wrote:
| i have never seen an HN thread about Reddit that didn't
| turn into mostly hating Reddit.
|
| Pretty much anywhere you go, people have a negativity bias
| both in what they say and in what they recall seeing. A
| great exception is Amazon reviews in which one must flip
| filters.
| Angostura wrote:
| I see you haven't been to the Apple subreddits lately. Liquid
| Glass was not well received
| resumenext wrote:
| I think by "like that" the person probably meant Reddit is
| filled with petite tyrants who cannot tolerate other
| people's viewpoints. It wouldn't surprise me if they call
| people who like Liquid Glass fascists.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| that's a lot of words to say "reddit mod"
| resumenext wrote:
| I don't think it makes sense to blame mods, rather the
| design and business model. HN has stiff moderation
| (thanks Dan g), but doesn't suffer the same fate. Reddit
| rewards hysterical posts and attracts hysterical people
| and bans carry much more weight. HN isn't designed to
| attract a huge user base, Reddit is.
| pilingual wrote:
| Roomba was originally written in Lisp.
|
| In the pandemic I bought the cheapest one, and it worked very
| well. It had a handle so I could pick it up, responsive buttons,
| and intuitive tones.
|
| A few years later I bought one that automatically suctioned
| debris into a home base. That one had no handle, required reset
| frequently, and had tones that made you guess which Japanese
| train station it just arrived at.
|
| Something went wrong at that company, and I don't think
| competition is an excuse.
| driscoll42 wrote:
| When Roomba thought it was about to be acquired by Amazon, it
| did lay off 10% of its staff -
| https://www.therobotreport.com/irobot-laying-off-10-of-
| staff.... and after the deal was canceled, it was disclosed
| that they had reduced R&D and focused on margin improvements,
| and there was some brain drain as people left Roomba as it was
| in a 18 month limbo - https://www.verdict.co.uk/irobot-to-cut-
| over-a-third-of-its-.... And of course all this self inflicted
| pain only hurt them doubly as the Amazon deal fell through. If
| they had acted as if they weren't going to be acquired they
| might be fine, but they tried to maximize the shareholder
| revenue.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Poor risk management!
| rwmj wrote:
| I wonder if Amazon did that deliberately.
|
| Back in the day (about 2002) I was working at an education
| software company which was trying to get itself acquired by
| Microsoft. MSFT came in and told us our software didn't
| conform to all these "standards" in the educational software
| space. Standards which, coincidentally, Microsoft themselves
| had written. These pseudo-standards did absolutely nothing to
| help our customers, and were pure bureaucracy and very very
| complicated to implement.
|
| I'd recently read Charles Ferguson's book about how his
| company was acquired by MSFT, and recognized this part of
| their standard operating procedure, along with extreme and
| invasive due diligence where they spend a lot of time working
| out if you're stupid/pliable enough to jump through these
| hoops while buying themselves time to work out if they can
| clone your product. I tried to warn management (yes, really -
| even bought them copies of the book) but naturally no one
| would listen, and reading a book was too much like hard work.
| At some point MSFT simply ceased returning management's
| calls, and rolled out a similar product a while later.
|
| The company imploded not long after, not for this reason in
| particular, but it was part of a general pattern of
| incompetence and mismanagement.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Agreed, putting aside the low cost competition, failed Amazon
| acquisition, etc.. the core product just literally got worse.
|
| I had over a ~10 year period purchased 3 roombas. Generally I
| purchased in the upper half of current product range at each
| purchase time.
|
| The most reliable, problem-free, longest lasting Roomba was the
| first initially purchased one. Every new one with more
| sensors/cameras/features worked worse. Cleaned worse, got stuck
| more often, was less easily fixed when in a bad state, etc.
| They got so bad I just stopped using them all together about a
| year ago.
|
| Every time I purchased a newer Dyson cordless by comparison,
| the product seemed better than the last generation.
| ghaff wrote:
| I have to believe that cordless broom vacs have put a dent in
| robovacs generally as well. When I looked at robovacs last, I
| came to the conclusion that my house wasn't great for them
| and that a broom vac I could just pull off the wall and run
| in a couple heavily trafficked locations for a few minutes
| was really just fine. The issue previously was that it was
| sort of a pain to pull out my plug in canister vac--so I
| mostly didn't. (I have a housekeeper every 3 to 4 weeks.)
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I tend to agree. I have a roomba, I like my roomba. But
| it's old and I probably won't get another robot vacuum
| because I have a cordless vac now.
|
| Is it my best vacuum if I'm comparing vacuums on technical
| specs? Hell no.
|
| Is it my best vacuum if I'm comparing by time used?
| Absolutely.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| I think also if you wfh then listening to the roomba go
| in circles for two hours versus just quickly vacuuming
| with a stick vacuum in fifteen minutes is a different
| equation.
| imp0cat wrote:
| The newer models are much more quiet compared to the
| older ones. In my case, the 980 vs 705 vac; the 980 can
| at times sound like a jet plane taking off. :)
| gugagore wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture
| cobbzilla wrote:
| One of the stated disadvantages was "the difficulty of
| designing adaptable action selection through highly distributed
| system of inhibition and suppression"
|
| I can't help but wonder how well a token-based AI could
| iteratively tune (or develop) a subsumption-based AI.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| I was a young kid when these came out. I remember being in a
| store that had one running around as a demo, bumping aimlessly
| around under shelves and off shopper's feet. With amusement, I
| watched it bump off a table leg, and rotate perfectly into
| position to drive through the open front door, then slowly drive
| forwards out of the store, never to be seen again.
|
| Not long after that is when I started reading hardware hacking
| stuff. The early Roombas were extremely hackable - each one had a
| serial port connector under a cover and you could connect it to a
| computer and drive them around. It was the pre-Raspberry Pi days;
| I remember people attaching a router or the lightest netbook they
| could find for some sort of wifi remote control.
|
| I was too young to ever get to play with one, but I did get to
| take a broken one apart once. Some highlights were the planetary
| gearbox contained inside the wheel hubs, and a cam on the rear
| caster which would trigger an optical limit switch once per
| rotation so it could estimate distance traveled.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| That original half-black/half-white caster for very
| simple/cheap optical limits was something of a known off-the-
| shelf approach. You'd often use them in various Lego Robotics
| environments a decade or two before the Roomba.
|
| It's easy to agree with the article here that the off-the-shelf
| simplicity of the early Roomba was a virtue. I appreciated that
| sense that you could look at a lot of the parts and guess what
| they were for or how the operated from the software side. That
| caster was one of those for "oh, yeah, that's probably for
| simple distance estimations".
| quadrature wrote:
| Slightly offtopic but i feel like someone around here might be
| able to help. I've been learning how to do SLAM with LIDAR data
| and I was curious what algorithms robot vacuums use. I'm
| currently implementing a particle filter and will also try out
| EKF.
| martythemaniak wrote:
| I've been playing around with SLAM using a depth camera, so I
| can't really tell you about LIDAR specifically, but I'd suggest
| doing some Deep Researches on the topic to get you a good lay
| of the land. During my searches for example, I came across this
| great compilation of visual SLAM projects:
| https://github.com/VSLAM-LAB/VSLAM-LAB
|
| Unless you're a massive operation, you're probably just using
| an existing academic project, many of which handle a variety of
| inputs (depth, 2D lidar, 3D lidar etc), ie RTABMAP (what I
| started with), ORB-SLAM, nVidia Issac ROS SLAM (if you're on
| Jetson) etc. AMCL is an old-school algorithm for localization
| with 2D data - I tried it by taking a fake 2D scan from the
| depth camera and it was pretty terrible, so currently I'm
| trying to get visual-only SLAM working well enough for me
| because I don't want to spend $1k on a decent 3D lidar.
| quadrature wrote:
| > but I'd suggest doing some Deep Researches on the topic to
| get you a good lay of the land
|
| thanks for the resources !. I've been trying to get a wide
| view by looking at different algorithms, but I was curious
| what was actually used in production systems especially for
| consumer products.
|
| RTABMAP and Cartographer came up in my searches, will
| definitely give these a closer look to understand how they
| work.
|
| Right now im starting off with filter based approaches like
| Particle filter and Kalman filter, but i'd also like to
| understand how the graph based approaches work.
| lightcrafter wrote:
| Lead mechanical engineer of the original Roomba here. The article
| is good on the behavior based algorithmic approach, but equal
| weight should be given to both the clever sensor design, and the
| extremely unusual 'passive feedback' cleaning head system the
| team came up with.
|
| The bump sensor, cliff detection, and wall detection were all
| implemented with plain IR LED emitter/receiver pairs, and very
| carefully shaped plastic enclosures so that the sensors provided
| a binary signal (floor vs. cliff, wall present/absent, etc.) that
| would hold up for the millions of cycles the machines racked up.
| This 'filtering in the sensor' simplified the inputs to the 8 bit
| 8051 microcontroller, and lowered the cost to a couple of cents
| for each detector.
|
| The cleaning head used the torque of the brush motor to actively
| control the height of the cleaning head as the machine moved from
| carpet to hard floors and back. That's the 'core trick' that let
| the Roomba clean well on multiple surfaces with about 15 watts of
| brush power. Details in the now-expired patent --
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US6883201B2/en.
|
| Dave Nugent came up with the original torque lift idea, and then
| we worked it into the 'floating pulley' approach used in the
| final design. It seems obvious now, but at the time this was a
| radically different approach to mobile cleaning. Everyone else
| (Electrolux, Karcher, etc.) tried to make a miniature vacuum, but
| that burned too much power for a mobile system.
|
| Joe Jones (project originator and team physicist) wrote a book
| about the original team and our development process that I
| recommend: https://dancingwithroomba.com/
|
| Minor tech notes: Phil Mass did the original programming on the
| first generation Roomba in C on the aforementioned Winbond 8051
| microcontroller. I think it had 256 bytes (!!!) of RAM and 4K of
| ROM.
|
| The code was burned into the chip at its creation (no onboard
| flash!) so it had to be right the first time. For the 2nd
| generation system they ported the behavior code to the internal
| LISP dialect in use at iRobot.
|
| It was a wild ride. I'm both proud of what we did, and dismayed
| (but not surprised) at what happened afterwards.
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