iRobot Review

iRobot is a lineup of automatic home cleaners, including Roomba floor vacuum cleaners, pool cleaners, and even robotic gutter cleaners. Find out everything you need to know about iRobot and their product lineup today.

What Is iRobot?

iRobot is a robot cleaning equipment company that sells a wide range of robotic cleaners for your home, including the popular Roomba vacuum cleaners and Mirra pool cleaners.

In addition to their lineup of home cleaners, iRobot offers business products like the Ava, which is described as a “video collaboration robot”.

iRobot calls itself “the robot company” and strives to create robotic technology that makes a real difference in people’s lives by delivering greater ease and efficiency.

The company was founded in 1990 by MIT roboticists. In 2015, the company earned $617 million in revenue. Today, it’s headquartered in Bedford, Massachusetts with additional offices in California, the UK, China, and Hong Kong.

iRobot Products

iRobot’s product lineup includes a small number of products for the home and office, including home cleaners and office productivity assistants. Here’s a brief overview of all products in the iRobot lineup:

Roomba

Roomba is the best-known robotic home cleaner on the market today. Today, the company sells four main versions of the Roomba, including the 650, 860, 880, and 980.

Roombas range in price from $374.99 (for the 650) or $899.99 (for the 980). All models come with self-charging functionality, where the Roomba will automatically head to its charging station to recharge itself when needed.

All Roomba models also let you clean on a schedule and can automatically clean your house when you’re not home. The more advanced models – including the 980 – offer multi-room navigation (clean up to 3 rooms), entire room cleaning (run continuously in a room for 2 hours), and the ability to extract debris from filters (which is useful if you have long hair or pet hair in your home).

The 980 also comes with the iRobot HOME App, which lets you connect to clean from anywhere.

Ultimately, all Roombas have the same basic functionality: you setup a charging station, setup a schedule, and then let the Roomba vacuum your house when you’re not home.

Braava

Braava is a mopping robot that promises to give you cleaner floors and a fresher home every day. It works on all hard floor types and can be set to damp/dry or wet modes.

There are multiple Braava models, including the Jet (designed for kitchens and bathrooms) and the Braava 300 series, which cleans up to 1,000 square feet in sweep mode and 350 square feet in mop mode.

Just like the Roomba, the Braava cleans up messes in your home for you. It comes with features like a precision jet spray and vibrating cleaning head to ensure your hard floor mess never lasts long.

The Jet is priced at $199.99 while the Braava 300 series is priced at $299.99. Both models will return to their starting points automatically after cleaning is complete.

Mirra

The iRobot Mirra is a pool cleaning robot that promises to help you spend “more time splashing and less time scrubbing”. There’s no installation required, and no hoses or booster pumps. You just drop it into your pool and let it go.

While it works, the Mirra will remove large debris and small particles from pool surfaces and the water – including leaves, hair, dirt, algae, pollen, and bacteria “as small as two microns”.

Mirra relies on a PVC brush to scrub the surface, walls, and bottom of your pool. It’s particularly effective along the water line of your pool, which is where oils and bacteria can build up.

To use the Mirra, you just drop it into the pool, press the clean button, and then let the device go to work. It comes with easy-to-empty debris canisters and quick-drain valves to make pool cleaning as easy as possible.

If you want to maximize the pool cleaning effectiveness of the Mirra, then iRobot recommends buying the iAdapt Nautiq, which helps Mirra measure the approximate dimensions of the pool and then choose the optimum cleaning cycle based on that information.

The iRobot Mirra 530 Pool Cleaning Robot is priced at $999.99.

iRobot Looj

The iRobot Looj is a gutter cleaning robot that “takes a dangerous job and does it for you”. You climb the ladder to your gutter, place the robot inside your gutter, and then let the robot travel down the gutter, blasting debris out of it as it goes along.

You don’t need to move the ladder or put yourself in danger by trying to clean hard-to-reach places. Insetad, iRobot’s Looj does it all for you.

The robot has flexible paddles on the front which slap debris out of the way as it goes along. The entire robot is pushed along by two treads along the back. It travels down your gutter, wiping out leaves, mud, dirt, and anything else in its way.

You can actually control the robot yourself and adjust its power or spend extra time cleaning a certain trouble spot. Using the iRobot Looj, a 30 foot section of gutter can be cleaned in five minutes. Up to 200 feet can be cleaned in each battery charge.

The iRobot Looj 330 is priced at $299.99.

iRobot Ava 500

The iRobot Ava 500 is the first on this list catered towards businesses. The Ava 500 helps you establish a physical presence in a room from anywhere in the world. It’s a human-sized pedestal with a screen at the top, allowing you to remotely connect with employees and offices around the world.

The Ava 500 can even move around on its own: you just specify a destination, and the robot will automatically navigate to the desired location without any human intervention. Meanwhile, the person on the other end of the connection gets a real-time view of the environment.

Everything is controlled remotely using an iPad or iPhone. After a meeting is complete, the robot will return to its charging station.

The Ava 500 is designed to save businesses money: instead of traveling to a distant office, you can establish a presence and supervise that office using the Ava 500. You can monitor your employees in action and conduct meetings – just like you were really there.

HD and audio videoconferencing technology comes standard.

iRobot InTouch Vita Remote Presence Robot

Just like the Ava 500 establishes a physical presence from a remote location, the InTouch Vita Remote Presence Robot is a telemedicine solution designed to help doctors care for patients from anywhere in the world.

Doctors can use the machine to view patients in real-time. The robot can also navigate on its own, using autonomous navigation technology to safely move around.

iRobot Ava Mobile Robotics Platform

The iRobot Ava Mobile Robotics Platform is purely in the concept phase right now, but it plans to be a suitable solution for third party development across a wide range of applications. The small robot is capable of autonomous navigation in the real world. It travels around and uses sensors and a video feed to relay data to another user.

Some of the potential uses for this technology include healthcare, material transport, logistics, security, retail, and manufacturing.

Thus far, the Ava Mobile Robotics Platform is only in the concept phase, but iRobot is purportedly experimenting with different designs.

One sample way in which the Ava Mobile Robotics Platform can be used is to roll around a retail store delivering sales information and coupons to customers.

Ultimately, iRobot is the world’s leading robotics manufacturer for residential and business users. Whether you need an automatic home cleaning robot or you want to supervise employees from anywhere in the world, iRobot is developing (and already has developed) a range of solutions that may become increasingly common in the future.