It’s a great day for Irobot. The brand behind what used to be the best robot vacuum cleaners in the business has discarded almost all its boomb fleet and replaced it with five new bots. The new alignment presents some quite important updates that, hopefully, should turn Ibot into the formidable player that was once in the world of robot vacuum.
Here is a summary of the characteristics that most excites me in the new Roomba range, in addition to a couple of developments in which I am less sold.
#1. Lidar (finally!)
Irobot has taken too long on board with Lidar, but later than ever. Lidar is basically the standard form of the Robot vacuum navigation industry, and generally agreed to be much better than the oldest Slam method found in the old Irobot bots. Its introduction means that new braces should offer faster and more reliable navigation and mapping. There are also more practical benefits: it means that the robot can navigate in the dark, for example, instead of requiring a light source. (Go to our article Lidar vslam for more information on how the two technologies are compared).
#2. Improved Moppolation Maps
In line with improved aesthetics, none of the new combination robots have the retracting mop platform that had so far the Irobot presentation card. Instead in the ‘Plus’ models (the 405 and 505) there are two rotating disco pads, the approach favored by much of the market now, and the one that has generally proven to be more efficient for cleaning in our revisions.
You can even go aside to offer more efficient edge mop, a feature included in some premium competitors models. Trap pads can lift up to 1 cm to cross the carpets or carpet, and the retracting static pad is still present in Combo 10 Max for those who are still worried about wet carpets.
Keep in mind that this improved mop configuration is not present in basic strbbing (105 and 205), which simply have a static spring pad in the form of D. However, they come with automatic carpet detection, which means that they should not try to mop their carpets.
#3. A new distinctive and friendly aspect
I suppose it is less essential, but I am also a great admirer of how the new alignment looks. Robots vacuum in general have a fairly generic appearance these days, and Irobot has recognized that perhaps the bright black or black plastic is not everyone’s aesthetics. The new bots have a design that the brand has called ‘grid’: geometric, rational, iconic and dynamic.
That could be excessively excessively, but I think that the mixture of matte and bright finishes seems more friendly and more likely than fitting with a softer home decoration than its average bot. I also appreciate that Irobot has struggled to create a distinctive aspect for the brand; That way, there is one step ahead of the competition.
#4. Better dust management
For some people, ‘dust management’ may not seem especially exciting. Well, I write about vacuum cleaners as a large part of my work, and I suffer from dust allergy, so I suppose I am more inverted than most. There are a couple of interesting developments here.
The first is that the dust bag on the auto-vacío dock can automatically beet when full, great news for patients with allergies, because now there is a basically zero opportunity for allergens to stop in the air once they have been absorbed.
The second is that one of the bots, the DustCompactor Roompactor 205, is designed to compress dust in its on -board container. That means that it can contain many more debris than usual, without the need for a bulky dock. For people with small houses and without space for a huge empty spring, it looks very interesting.
#5. A new application
I did not have great complaints about the original Irobot application, but the brand has restarted it to go with its new bright bots, and the new and improved looks even better.
You can establish custom cleaning routines, get estimates of how long the current task will take to clean and access the ideas of the rooms that need more attention. Because now we have lidar, it is also possible to see his bot as his cleaning routine progresses, instead of having to guess where he is and what he does.
#6. Suction specifications
This is small, but significant for customer experience: hopefully, Irobot will once again share the maximum suction power of each model, in Pascals. This is something that the brand stopped doing a while ago, claiming that it is not what is not everything, and that things like the roller design play an important role in how well a robot cleans.
While they are not wrong there, it is still a very useful guide over how Sucky could be a bot, and without suction specifications it was difficult to make sense of the Roomba range, and even more complicated to place its models within the broader market.
I say ‘hopefully’, because although this was part of my initial informative session, the marketing materials that I have received since they have no suction specifications. On the other hand, they say things like “70x more suction” (which compares with the 600 Roba series, which was launched more than a decade ago). Sigh.
According to my initial notes, the new models have 7,000 suction. That is not very up with the competition, but it is still a decent amount for the prices that Irobot is charging. Combined with an efficient design (we have always been fans of Irobot’s dual rollers), they can be a lot to provide good clean maintenance for the average home.
#7. Names that make sense
Another backward update, in terms of friendship with the client, is that Irobot has rethink its name conventions. The new fleet is separated into a Roomba, Broker Plus and Roomba Max Models, following a good> better configuration so that it really has an idea of how the alignment is compared.
There may be some confusion with those who remember that in the old system, ‘also’ it meant that there was a self-surrounding dock, while here does not mean that. In general, however, I prefer this to J-Something’s mess, I-Somthings-Espera, is it an I or AJ anyway? – That preceded it.
2 innovations that worry me …
#1. Bots without high disc
The lidar is called ‘Clearview’ and appears in all models. Interestingly, Irobot has eliminated the album elevated in combo 205 dustcompactor, to give a more aerodynamic design. This model uses the same Lidar technology, but has become the front of the robot. The problem is that the album is there for a purpose; to allow the bot ‘see’ everywhere and sail with precision. Changing Lidar technology in the front of the robovac means a much narrower field of vision.
Other brands are also experiencing with the elimination of the album, but all I have found have introduced a new technology to compensate for that more limited field of vision. For example, Dreame X50 Ultra Complete and Roborock Saros 10 (Incoming reviews) have an album that can be retracted in the robot’s body when approaching a limited height area, but will appear again when the space allows it.
The Roborock Qrevo Slim and Saros 10R completely eliminate an album, but for this the brand has completely designed a completely new navigation method, called Starsight, to ensure that navigation is not compromised. I am not an engineer, but surely they did not go to all those problems if you could cut the album without impact.
The Irobot spokesman with whom I talked assured me that there would be no commitment in navigation precision: they told me that they were testing two bots, one with the album and one without, and they both behaved in the same way. I will be really interested in trying this and seeing for myself.
#2. The continuous presence of combo 10 max
My other light missing is that the current segment ‘Max’ consists only of combo 10 max. He only launched in July 2024, so maybe Irobot felt it was too soon to discard it. However, such as what should be the bright star of the Roomba fleet, it is disappointing.
It was generally not well received: we granted it about 3 stars less than ideals in our Roomba 10 Max Rubby Review, with our tester complaining about a painfully slow mapping (not lidar here) and cleaning of maps lower than the standard. Both aspects have improved in the new Plus models, which seem much more promising to me.
In general, however, it is a promising news of Irobot, and I appreciate that the brand has been bold enough to accept that what I was doing was not working and restart. I am excited to put these new models on my floor and try the new functions for me.
