Amazon to acquire maker of Roomba vacuum for roughly $1.7B
Roomba / iRobot is years behind the Chinese companies. We just got an Ecovacs X1 Omni - a mopping vacuum bot with actual rotating mop scrubbers, AI vision obstacle avoidance, LIDAR mapping, and most importantly fully automated water fill & mop pad cleaning at the base station. We fill a clean water tank & empty the dirty one about once a week. Floors are spotless - huge difference from static cloth mopping bots.<p>Meanwhile, iRobot still hadn’t figured out how to make an effective stand-alone mop bot, much less an auto fill station or combined bot that actually works. Roborock and Ecovacs products launch in China 6-12 months before their US launch. By the time Roomba has a decent mop bot, the X2 or X3 will probably be out offering integration with home plumbing to avoid any manual intervention for months at a time.<p>EDIT: commenters are asking what works offline from Roborock / Ecovacs. For the self-cleaning-mop generation like the X1 Omni:<p>- Roborock obstacle avoidance is local, but works better with cloud.<p>- Roborock can be controlled by a local home automation server without internet access.<p>- Ecovacs obstacle avoidance requires cloud.<p>- Ecovacs control requires cloud.<p>I remembered these stats from a Youtube video that I can't find; probably in my partner's history since we watched reviews on the TV together.<p>I picked the X1 Omni over the Roborock because it has superior mopping performance on tile floors, but I think both would be good options. It seems like Roborock is more privacy compatible.