iRobot Declares Bankruptcy, Marking the End of the First Era of Home Robots

There was a moment in the early 2000s when letting a robot roam freely around your house felt slightly unhinged. And yet, millions of us did exactly that. We named them. We rescued them from getting stuck under couches. We watched them gently bonk into walls like confused little turtles. And through all of that, iRobot quietly did something enormous. We just didn't know it yet.

Now iRobot has declared bankruptcy, and while the company is trying to reassure customers that their Roombas are not about to brick themselves overnight, it still feels like the end of an era. Not a dramatic explosion, not a villain arc. Just a soft, slightly sad powering down.

Roomba mattered. A lot. It was the first mass produced household robot that regular people invited into their homes without thinking twice. Not a toy, not a science fair project, but an actual autonomous machine doing a real job. Clumsily, inefficiently, and sometimes hilariously wrong. But it worked. Enough.

One day, we are going to look back at these weird little disc shaped robots with their random movement patterns and tiny dust bins and laugh. In a future where home robots understand rooms, objects, schedules, and intent, the Roomba will look like a fossil. But fossils are important. They show you where the evolution started.

The problem is not that iRobot failed. It's that the world moved faster than a single purpose robot ever could. AI driven navigation, multi function home assistants, robots that see, reason, and adapt. The Roomba was built for a different moment, one where bumping into things was good enough.

iRobot didn't lose relevance because it was bad. It lost relevance because it was early.

And honestly, that's kind of the best legacy a robot can have.

R.I.P Roomba, I will never forget you.