Fourteen failures and a vacuum cleaner

Before cleaning its first living room, iRobot tried selling robots to NASA, the Pentagon and the toy industry. This is the story of how twelve years of failure became the most successful home robot in history, and how that story ended, a quarter century later, in bankruptcy court.

In 1990, MIT's artificial intelligence laboratory had a six-legged celebrity. Its name was Genghis, it looked like a metal insect, and it walked without any central computer telling it how: each leg reacted to the terrain on its own, and the walk emerged from the sum of reflexes. Its creator, Australian professor Rodney Brooks, had spent years defending an academic heresy: intelligence needs no plan, only simple behaviors well stacked. That year, Brooks founded a company with two of his students: Colin Angle, who had built much of Genghis's body, and Helen Greiner, an engineer who at eleven had watched Star Wars and decided her life would be about building R2-D2.

Twelve years building robots for space and war. Success arrived vacuuming living rooms.

The original plan was grandiose: robots to explore space. And for twelve years, almost everything failed. The company (first IS Robotics, then iRobot) tried, by Brooks's own count, fourteen business models: rovers for NASA, museum robots, industrial cleaning robots, animatronic dolls with Hasbro, military robots. They lived project to project, with no product of their own to pay salaries steadily.

But every failure left a part behind. From the toys, the most valuable one: in 1997, Brooks traveled to Taiwan and learned from the masters of cheap manufacturing that a mechanism can cost dollars instead of thousands. From the military robots, toughness: their PackBots were built to survive soldiers, rubble and mud. And from the insect Genghis, the brain: a robot could move through an unknown space with no map at all, bouncing and turning, if its behaviors were well chosen. Together, the three parts formed something nobody had ever sold: a machine cheap, tough and just smart enough to clean a house without knowing it.

On September 18, 2002, iRobot introduced the Roomba at $199.95, the price of a decent appliance rather than a science-fiction dream. It was the first automatic vacuum in the United States and the success was immediate: it sold faster than the company could build it. That same autumn, at the other end of the catalog, its military PackBots were exploring caves in Afghanistan; nine years later they would enter the Fukushima reactors where no human could. No other company has covered that range: from your living room to a nuclear plant in meltdown, with the same philosophy of ugly, cheap, useful robots.

What happened next was no longer engineering but culture. The Roomba became a verb, a sitcom character and the favorite vehicle of internet cats. iRobot passed 50 million robots sold, and the word Roomba did for home robotics what Google did for search engines: it named the whole category. Every robot that aspires to enter a house today, including the teleoperated Neo humanoid, walks on the carpet that disc cleaned.

The ending is more bitter. Amazon announced in 2022 it would buy iRobot for $1.7 billion; European regulatory scrutiny buried the deal in January 2024 and left the company indebted, without a plan B, overtaken by Chinese rivals iterating faster. Colin Angle, the student who had built insects with Brooks, left the helm that same year. On December 14, 2025, iRobot filed for Chapter 11, and in February 2026 it emerged from the process with a new owner: Picea Robotics, the Chinese manufacturer that assembled its robots. The company that taught the world a robot could live at home ended up owned by its own assembly line.

The moral outlives the company, and it is the entire thesis of our home guide: the home is not conquered with butler promises, it is conquered with one boring task done perfectly for decades. It took fourteen failures to find that task. The full Roomba page, verdict and numbers included, tells what became of the machine that pulled it off.