If you need a little help keeping your home clean in the new year, a robot vacuum can help. It may not be an essential piece of tech, especially if you already have a decent vacuum, but it can make consistent cleaning much easier by letting you automate a portion of the process. Wellbots has a number of Roomba robot vacuums on sale right now, including the new Combo j7+, which is iRobot’s first vac-and-mop device. You can pick that up for $200 less than usual with the code ENG200 at checkout, while the standard Roomba j7+ and the s9+ are $200 off as well with the same code.
The Combo j7+ may be iRobot’s first dip into the two-in-one robo-vac space, but it joins a slew of other dual-use devices that have been on the market for a while. With this Roomba, you’ll have to fill its reservoir with water and cleaning solution whenever you want the machine to mop your floors during a job.
Thanks to iRobot’s latest technology, the Roomba will intelligently switch from vacuuming to mopping when it senses the appropriate type of flooring. In our brief time with the Combo j7+ thus far, we found it to be a solid cleaning machine made better by the controls you have in the iRobot mobile app. The most frustrating aspect is how frequently you may have to refill the reservoir, since it only takes 210 ml of liquid at a time.
If you don’t need mopping capabilities, the standard Roomba j7+ or the s9+ are good alternatives, especially when you can get them while on sale like this. Both come with clean bases, which allow the robo-vacs to automatically empty their dustbins after every job. You’ll only have to change the bag in the clean base every couple of months. Combine that with cleaning schedules that you can set in the mobile app and you may be able to leave your Roomba unattended as it sucks up dirt in your house, day in and day out, for weeks on end. The j7+ has obstacle avoidance technology that helps it detect things like pet poop and navigate around them as it cleans. The s9+, on the other hand, has the strongest suction power of any iRobot machine and it has a more corner-friendly design, too.
If you want more than just a robot vacuum, Roborock's models provide not just exceptional sucking power but mopping functions as well. Now, you can grab some of the company's best models at steep discounts thanks to Amazon's latest sale. Some of the best deals include the E5 Robot Vacuum and Mop at $200 (44 percent off), the S7 Robot Vacuum and Mop ($410, 37 percent off) and the Roborock S7+ Robot Vacuum and Sonic Mop at $680, or 28 percent off the regular $950 price.
The Roborock E5 is one of the best value robot vacuum/mops out there, but that doesn't mean you're losing out on features. It offers a powerful 2,500PA of suction, yet can clean for up to 200 minutes of a charge. It's also ideal for pet hair and other bulky debris thanks to the large 640ml (0.67 quart) dustbin. It can vacuum and mop simultaneously, mopping up to 1,600 square feet efficiently thanks to the OpticEye scanning and dual gyroscopes. And it's no slouch technology-wise, offering an app, Alexa voice and a remote to give you fine control over cleaning. Normally it's priced at $360, but you can grab one now for just $200.
The Roborock S7 has the same 2500PA suction, but comes with a larger water tank for mopping and an ultrasonic sound feature that identifies carpet so the machine can automatically adjust cleaning strength. Also, the S7 can be connected to a clean base, so you have the option in the future to add another level of convenience to your robo-vac. It also supports voice control with Alexa or the Google Assistant, full app control, home mapping, cleaning schedules and spot cleaning, too. Normally priced at $650, you can grab it now for $410 ($240 off).
Finally, if you've been saving up for the best robotic mop/vacuum around, The Roborock S7+ fits the bill. It's a vac-and-mop combo, and its mopping map automatically lifts itself out of the way when the machine reaches the carpet. At the same time, the mop picks up more dirt thanks to the sonic vibration technology. And it can dump the dirt after each cleaning, so you don't need to deal with emptying for up to 120 days. It cleans efficiently thanks to LiDAR navigation, while offering voice control, home mapping and more. The Roborock S7+ is normally quite expensive at $950, but it's on sale for $680, or $270 off the regular price.
So much for giggling at robots falling down. Researchers at the University of Lorraine have developed a "Damage Reflex" system (aka D-Reflex) that has a humanoid TALOS robot prop itself against a wall when one of its legs is broken, much like a human who just lost their balance. The neural network-based system uses its experience (in this case, 882,000 training simulations) to quickly find a point on the wall most likely to provide stability. The robot doesn't need to know how it was damaged, and can reach out roughly as quickly as a person.
The result, as IEEE Spectrumnotes, is the anti-comedy you'd expect. Instead of a tumble to the ground, the robot braces itself against the wall like someone who just sprained their ankle. It's not particularly graceful and requires that the robot stops its hand the moment it makes contact, but it's effective in three out of four tests.
D-Reflex isn't guaranteed to prevent a fall, if partly because it can't account for every possible position or surface. It also doesn't help the robot recover once it averts catastrophe — you won't see the automaton limping along a wall until it finds help. The current approach is also based around a stationary bot, and won't help if an actuator fails mid-stride.
Researchers hope to make a system that's useful on the move, however, and envision robots that can grab chairs and other complex objects when a fall is imminent. This could save the cost of replacing worker robots that would otherwise plunge to their doom, and might lead to more 'natural' bots that learn to use their environments to their advantage. One thing's for sure: if the robopocalypse happens, tripping the machines won't stop them for long.
A week ago, the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) petitioned the Board of Supervisors for permission to deploy robots that can kill suspects under specific circumstances. Now, the board has approved the petition with a vote of 8 vs. 3 despite strong opposition from civil liberties groups. Under the new policy, robots can be used "as a deadly force option when risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers are imminent and outweigh any other force option available to the SFPD."
The city's police force has over a dozen robots at the moment, which are equipped with the capability to provide video reconnaissance and to diffuse bombs. None of them have weapons and live ammunition, the SFPD says, and there are no plans to fit them with any. However, they can now be deployed with explosives attached "to contact, incapacitate, or disorient violent, armed, or dangerous suspect," an SFPD spokesperson said. "Robots equipped in this manner would only be used in extreme circumstances to save or prevent further loss of innocent lives," they added.
As NPR notes, SF officials have to define the authorized uses of its robots and other military-grade equipment due to a California law that went into effect this year. Aaron Peskin, a Board of Supervisor member, added a line to the SFPD's original draft policy that said: "Robots shall not be used as a Use of Force against any person." But the SFPD amended the proposal to allow the use of robots as "a deadly force option." The board approved that version of the policy with additional amendments, stating that officials can only use robots with explosive charges after they had exhausted all alternative force or de-escalation tactics. Also, only a limited number of high-ranking officials will be able authorize the use of robots as a deadly force option.
Among all of San Francisco's supervisors, only Shamann Walton, Dean Preston and Hillary Ronen voted "no" on approving the policy. Preston called allowing the SFPD to use robots to kill people "deeply disturbing" and a "sad moment" for the city. In his full statement, he said that giving the police the power to arm remote-controlled robots will "place Black and brown people in disproportionate danger of harm or death." Meanwhile, Rafael Mandelman, who supported the use of robots as a deadly force from the beginning, defended his vote and said that the final version of the policy "lays out reasonable restrictions on the use of robots" despite "the hyperbole expressed by many who oppose" it.
Mandelman also told Fox KTVUthat it would be irresponsible not to make plans to use robots in life-threatening situations. Matthew Guariglia of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told the news organization, however, that by equipping robots, "[w]e are going to lessen the burden of using deadly force from having to pull a gun and pull the trigger to a button on a remote control."
If you've wanted a robot vacuum but were put off by the sometimes-high prices, now's your chance to dive in. Anker's Eufy brand is holding a Black Friday sale on Amazon that includes major discounts for its robotic cleaners, including lower-priced models. The RoboVac 11S Max is down to just $130, or 48 percent off its usual price. One of the company's best devices, the RoboVac X8, has dropped to $300 instead of its usual $500. Other products are typically at least 30 percent off.
The RoboVac 11S Max is a more powerful version of the base 11S that made it to our list of the best budget robot vacuums. That model is not only capable and intelligent, but slim enough to clean under chairs and tables that might block some competitors. The improved suction might increase noise, but it should also catch more crumbs than its standard counterpart.
The RoboVac X8, meanwhile, is a non-hybrid variant of one of the best robot vacuums we've seen at any price. It won't mop like the X8 Hybrid, but you can still expect strong suction, laser navigation and WiFi. This machine will not only suck up more debris (including pet hair) than some of its rivals, but do so more efficiently. At this price, it's easier to rationalize than mid-tier competitors costing hundreds of dollars more.
Robots that can whack a golf ball down a fairway aren't exactly new, but building one that can play the nuanced short game is a more complex problem. Researchers at Paderborn University in Germany have done just that with Golfi, a machine that uses a neural network to figure out how to line up a putt and how hard to hit the ball to get it into the hole from anywhere on the green.
The robot takes a snapshot of the green with a Microsoft Kinect 3D camera and it simulates thousands of random shots taken from different positions. It takes factors like the turf's rolling resistance, the ball's weight and the starting velocity into account. Paderborn doctoral student Annika Junker told IEEE Research that training Golfi on simulated golf shots takes five minutes, compared with 30-40 hours were the team to feed data from real-life shots into the system.
Once Golfi has figured out the shot it should take, it rolls over to the ball and uses a belt-driven gear shaft with a putter attached to make the putt. The robot doesn't get the ball in the hole every time, though. Junker said the robot nailed the shot around 60-70 percent of the time. That's still a better accuracy rate than most amateur golfers and at least you won't see Golfi fly off the handle like Happy Gilmore if it misses.
However, Golfi sometimes drove over the ball and moved it out of position. The researchers have only tested the robot in the lab, so real-world conditions, like greens with divots or steep slopes, may pose problems for a system that relies on a bird's-eye view.
In any case, the researchers didn't set out to build a robot capable of competing with PGA Tour pros. They hope that the techniques they used in Golfi could be used for other robotics applications. “You can also transfer that to other problems, where you have some knowledge about the system and could model parts of it to obtain some data, but you can’t model everything,” Niklas Fittkau, another Paderborn University doctoral student and co-lead author of a paper on Golfi, told IEEE Research.
Back in 2016, a different robot called LDRIC sank a hole-in-one at a PGA event (albeit on the fifth attempt). I wonder who footed the bill for a round of drinks at the clubhouse afterward.
Autonomous vacuum maker iRobot is a lot like Tesla, not necessarily by reinventing an existing concept — vacuums, robots and electric cars all existed before these two companies came on the scene — but by imbuing their products with that intangible quirk that makes people sit up and take notice. Just as Tesla ignited the public's imagination as to what an electric car could be and do, iRobot has expanded our perception of how domestic robots can fit into our homes and lives.
More than two dozen leading experts from across the technology sector have come together in ‘You Are Not Expected to Understand This’: How 26 Lines of Code Changed the Worldto discuss how seemingly innocuous lines of code have fundamentally shaped and hemmed the modern world. In the excerpt below, Upshot Deputy Editor Lowen Liu, explores the development of iRobot's Roomba vacuum and its unlikely feline brand ambassadors.
According to Colin Angle, the CEO and cofounder of iRobot, the Roomba faced some early difficulties before it was rescued by two events. The disc-shaped robot vacuum had gotten off to a hot start in late 2002, with good press and a sales partner in the novelty chain store Brookstone. Then sales started to slow, just as the company had spent heavily to stock up on inventory. The company found itself on the other side of Black Friday in 2003 with thousands upon thousands of Roombas sitting unsold in warehouses.
Then around this time, Pepsi aired a commercial starring comedian Dave Chappelle. In the ad, Chappelle teases a circular robot vacuum with his soft drink while waiting for a date. The vacuum ends up eating the comedian’s pants—schlupp. Angle remembers that at a team meeting soon after, the head of e-commerce said something like: “Hey, why did sales triple yesterday?” The second transformative moment for the company was the rapid proliferation of cat videos on a new video-sharing platform that launched at the end of 2005. A very specific kind of cat video: felines pawing suspiciously at Roombas, leaping nervously out of Roombas’ paths, and, of course, riding on them. So many cats, riding on so many Roombas. It was the best kind of advertising a company could ask for: it not only popularized the company’s product but made it charming. The Roomba was a bona fide hit.
By the end of 2020, iRobot had sold 35 million vacuums, leading the charge in a booming robot vacuum market.
The Pepsi ad and the cat videos appear to be tales of early days serendipity, lessons on the power of good luck and free advertising. They also appear at first to be hardware stories— stories of cool new objects entering the consumer culture. But the role of the Roomba’s software can’t be underestimated. It’s the programming that elevates the round little suckers from being mere appliances to something more. Those pioneering vacuums not only moved, they decided in some mysterious way where to go. In the Pepsi commercial, the vacuum is given just enough personality to become a date-sabotaging sidekick. In the cat videos the Roomba isn’t just a pet conveyer, but a diligent worker, fulfilling its duties even while carrying a capricious passenger on its back. For the first truly successful household robot, the Roomba couldn’t just do its job well; it had to win over customers who had never seen anything like it.
Like many inventions, the Roomba was bred of good fortune but also a kind of inevitability. It was the brainchild of iRobot’s first hire, former MIT roboticist Joe Jones, who began trying to make an autonomous vacuum in the late 1980s. He joined iRobot in 1992, and over the next decade, as it worked on other projects, the company developed crucial expertise in areas of robotics that had nothing to do with suction: it developed a small, efficient multithreaded operating system; it learned to miniaturize mechanics while building toys for Hasbro; it garnered cleaning know-how while building large floor sweepers for SC Johnson; it honed a spiral-based navigation system while creating mine-hunting robots for the US government. It was a little like learning to paint a fence and wax a car and only later realizing you’ve become a Karate Kid.
The first Roombas needed to be cheap—both to make and (relatively) to sell—to have any chance of success reaching a large number of American households. There was a seemingly endless list of constraints: a vacuum that required hardly any battery power, and navigation that couldn’t afford to use fancy lasers—only a single camera. The machine wasn’t going to have the ability to know where it was in a room or remember where it had been. Its methods had to be heuristic, a set of behaviors that combined trial and error with canned responses to various inputs. If the Roomba were “alive,” as the Pepsi commercial playfully suggested, then its existence would more accurately have been interpreted as a progression of instants—did I just run into something? Am I coming up to a ledge? And if so, what should I do next? All conditions prepared for in its programming. An insect, essentially, reacting rather than planning.
And all this knowledge, limited as it was, had to be stuffed inside a tiny chip within a small plastic frame that also had to be able to suck up dirt. Vacuums, even handheld versions, were historically bulky and clumsy things, commensurate with the violence and noise of what they were designed to do. The first Roomba had to eschew a lot of the more complicated machinery, relying instead on suction that accelerated through a narrow opening created by two rubber strips, like a reverse whistle.
But the lasting magic of those early Roombas remains the way they moved. Jones has said that the navigation of the original Roomba appears random but isn’t—every so often the robot should follow a wall rather than bounce away from it. In the words of the original patent filed by Jones and Roomba cocreator Mark Chiappetta, the system combines a deterministic component with random motion. That small bit of unpredictability was pretty good at covering the floor—and also made the thing mesmerizing to watch. As prototypes were developed, the code had to account for an increasing number of situations as the company uncovered new ways for the robot to get stuck, or new edge cases where the robot encountered two obstacles at once. All that added up until, just before launch, the robot’s software no longer fit on its allotted memory. Angle called up his cofounder, Rodney Brooks, who was about to board a transpacific flight. Brooks spent the flight rewriting the code compiler, packing the Roomba’s software into 30 percent less space. The Roomba was born.
In 2006 Joe Jones moved on from iRobot, and in 2015 he founded a company that makes robots to weed your garden. The weeding robots have not, as yet, taken the gardening world by storm. And this brings us to perhaps the most interesting part of the Roomba’s legacy: how lonely it is.
You’d be in good company if you once assumed that the arrival of the Roomba would open the door to an explosion of home robotics. Angle told me that if someone went back in time and let him know that iRobot would build a successful vacuum, he would have replied, “That’s nice, but what else did we really accomplish?” A simple glance around the home is evidence enough that a future filled with robots around the home has so far failed to come true. Why? Well for one, robotics, as any roboticist will tell you, is hard. The Roomba benefited from a set of very limited variables: a flat floor, a known range of obstacles, dirt that is more or less the same everywhere you go. And even that required dozens of programmed behaviors.
As Angle describes it, what makes the Roomba’s success so hard to replicate is how well it satisfied the three biggest criteria for adoption: it performed a task that was unpleasant; it performed a task that had to be done relatively frequently; and it was affordable. Cleaning toilets is a pain but not done super frequently. Folding laundry is both, but mechanically arduous. Vacuuming a floor, though—well, now you’re talking.
Yet for all the forces that led to the creation of the Roomba, its invention alone wasn’t a guarantee of success. What is it that made those cat videos so much fun? It’s a question that lies close to the heart of the Roomba’s original navigation system: part determinism, part randomness. My theory is that it wasn’t just the Roomba’s navigation that endeared it to fans—it was how halting and unpredictable that movement could be. The cats weren’t just along for an uneventful ride; they had to catch themselves as the robot turned unexpectedly or hit an object. (One YouTuber affectionately described the vacuum as “a drunk coming home from the bar.”) According to this theory, it’s the imperfection that is anthropomorphic. We are still more likely to welcome into our homes robots that are better at slapstick than superhuman feats. It’s worth noting that the top-of-the-line Roomba today will map your rooms and store that map on an app, so that it can choose the most efficient lawnmower-like cleaning path. In these high-end models, the old spiral navigation system is no longer needed. Neither is bumping into walls.
Watching one of these Roombas clean a room is a lot less fun than it used to be. And it makes me wonder what the fate of the Roomba may have been had the first ever robot vacuum launched after the age of smartphones, already armed with the capacity to roll through rooms with precise confidence, rather than stumble along. It’s not always easy, after all, to trust someone who seems to know exactly where they are going.
While you may have a big list of gifts to get for others over the next couple of weeks, now is a good time to pick up things for yourself as well. There's arguably no better time of the year to pick up expensive gadgets like robot vacuums since most of them will be on sale. Wellbots is kicking things off early this year in the smart home space by discounting both the iRobot j7 and j7+ vacuums, bringing them down to $349 and $599, respectively, when you use the codes ENG250 and ENG200 at checkout.
These are essentially the same robot vacuum, but the "plus" variant comes with a clean base. If you're unfamiliar, clean bases are basically garbage cans attached to the robot's charging base, and the vacuum will automatically empty its bin into the base after each job. If vacuuming is one of your least favorite chores, getting a robo-vac with a clean base makes it so you only have to interact with your cleaning robot once a month or so when you need to change out the base's bag.
The Roomba j7 series came out last year and it features upgraded AI-driven computer vision that gives it improved obstacle avoidance. It'll maneuver its way around chairs, table legs and more with ease, plus that enhanced technology should help it avoid an instances of a robo-vac's worst enemy: pet poop. The j7 earned a spot in our best robot vacuum guide for its solid obstacle avoidance, plus its strong suction power, accurate home mapping and the ease of use of its companion app. iRobot's mobile app will be easy for even novices to learn, and it lets you set cleaning schedules, remotely control the vacuum and more from anywhere.
In this sale, the $600 Roomba j7+ is the same price as the j7 usually is without the clean base, which makes the higher-end configuration even more compelling. However, if you're on a tighter budget, you can skip the clean base and get all of the same cleaning technology for only $350.
Competition in the robot dog market is getting ugly. As The Robot Reportexplains, Boston Dynamics is suing Ghost Robotics for allegedly infringing seven patents linked to its Spot quadruped. The Spirit 40 and Vision 60 (shown above) purportedly borrow key technologies from Spot, including systems for self-righting and climbing stairs.
Boston Dynamics says it asked Ghost Robotics to review Spot-related patents in July 2020, five months after the launch of the Spirit 40. After that, Boston claims to have sent two cease-and-desist letters asking Ghost to stop marketing its robot canines. Ghost was thus well aware of what it was doing, according to the lawsuit.
We've asked Ghost Robotics for comment. In a statement, Boston Dynamics claimed it "welcome[s] competition" but would crack down on companies violating its intellectual property rights. The Hyundai-owned firm is seeking unspecified damages as part of the suit.
A lawsuit like this isn't unexpected. Boston Dynamics initially focused on research, but it has increasingly turned to commercializing robots like Spot and Stretch. Rivals like Ghost Robotics could pose threats to Boston's still-young business, whether or not they're copying technology in the process. Even if the suit fails, it could deter other companies from making robot dogs of their own.
We've finally reached the point where a robot can vacuum for us — but smart vacs aren't cheap. Eufy, from parent company Anker, makes solid and affordable robot vacuums that often go on sale. In fact, we recommend waiting until a good deal like this comes around before diving in so you can join the robot revolution while saving some cash. Right now Amazon is hosting a sale on Eufy vacuums with discounts of up to 44 percent on the smart vacs. The sale includes the Eufy RoboVac 11S, which is down to $140 from its list price of $230, just be sure to click the box to apply the $60 coupon.
We tested the 11S in our budget robot vacuum guide and named it the best bang for your buck. We particularly liked the way the slimmer profile was able to get under low-slung furniture and thought its collision avoidance was remarkable. It's relatively quiet, and did a good job of cleaning the carpets, only missing the occasional crumb. It doesn't have WiFi, but the included remote takes on most of the scheduling features you'd find in an app. Overall, it impressed us with its smarts, especially for the price, which is now an even better deal.
Another robot mentioned in our guide is the Eufy RoboVac G30, it's just $180 right now, which is a steep 44 percent lower than its $319 list price. The G30 is a newer model than the 11S, and features Dynamic Navigation 2.0, improved navigation software that relies less on random patterns to choose its cleaning path. Anker gives the Pascal (Pa) units to rate the suction of Eufy vacuums, and the G30 is rated to 2000pa, which is on the higher end of the spectrum (the 11S above rates at 1300Pa). With WiFi and a dedicated app, you can control it from your phone, or even with Alexa if you have an Echo smart speaker or display.
The Eufy RoboVac X8 Hybrid got a well-deserved honorable mention in our best robot vacuum guide. It's a robot vacuum and mop in one, which you can get for $320 right now, instead of its usual $650. The sale price takes 15 percent off, and the clickable coupon discounts another $230. We liked the amount of customization you get with the X8, including a "tap and go" feature that gets the vac to clean an exact spot. You can also straight up control the robot manually, which we thought felt like controlling a slow and slightly clumsy RC car.
The "hybrid" in the name refers to the mopping features. When you want to wipe down your hard floors, there's an on-board water tank to fill and included mopping cloths to attach. You'll also want to mark off the no-go zones wherever there's carpet.
The X8 uses LiDAR laser scanning to navigate and unlike some smart vacs, the X8 can learn where not to go through virtual no-go zones you set within the app. We were impressed by how well the X8 navigated, but you should note that if you prefer to set your boundaries using boundary strips, the X8 doesn't come with any, you'll have to buy those separately.
