Two years before sci-fi author Isaac Asimov died in 1992, the American company iRobot was founded in Bedford, Massachusetts. Its range of autonomous home vacuum cleaners, called Roomba, wanted to shape the future of house cleaning. The company has now filed for bankruptcy, saying it would be bought by China’s Picea Robotics.
The early pioneer in household robotics has struggled for years amid increasing competition from Chinese manufacturers. After an acquisition deal with Amazon failed in 2022, derailed by the European Union’s competition watchdog, the company tried to work with Picea Robotics to come up with new Roombas.
Then came US tariffs, which hit the company hard, especially the 46 per cent levy on Vietnam, where iRobot manufactures vacuum cleaners for the US market. According to Reuters, the tariffs raised the company’s costs by $23 million in 2025 and it made it difficult to plan for the future.
The company was valued at $3.56 billion in 2021 with the pandemic driving strong demand for its products. It is now valued at around $140 million, according to data compiled by LSEG, a leading provider of financial markets data and infrastructure.
Founded by three members of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, the early focus of the company was on defence and space technology before launching the Roomba in 2002. The company’s early ventures led to rovers that could perform disaster-relief tasks, like in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
One of its founders, Rodney Brooks (the other two being Colin Angle and Helen Greiner), a former MIT lab director who has spent his career making intelligent machines a part of everyday life, wrote in an essay in September that “a lot of money will have disappeared, spent on trying to squeeze performance, any performance, from today’s humanoid robots. But those robots will be long gone and mostly conveniently forgotten. That is the next 15 years for you.”
Elon Musk is betting on the future of Tesla’s robot, the Optimus. He predicted that his company’s robot “could probably achieve 5x the productivity of a person per year because it can operate 24/7”.
Google researchers are working with the Austin-based humanoid robot start-up Apptronik, a start-up whose robot is being used in manufacturing by companies including Mercedes-Benz. Chinese companies in this space include Unitree and Booster Robots.
Roomba’s popularity turned the gadget into a verb, a meme and even an amusement for cats, who have been spotted riding the device.
According to a statement issued by iRobot, the restructuring plan allows the company to “continue operating in the ordinary course with no anticipated disruption to its app functionality, customer programmes, global partners, supply chain relationships, or ongoing product support”.