The original robot vacuum company showed off the Roomba Duo at the IFA tech show in Berlin. This innovation combines a heavy-duty floor-washing machine with a smaller, slimmer Roomba. The duo can move around your home together, with the main unit mopping and sweeping larger floor areas and the smaller unit lowering mechanically when needed to clean tighter spaces, such as under tables or in corners.
The Duo is also an autonomous mobile dock, with clean and dirty water tanks and a dust bag on board, and it uses lidar and camera-based navigation to map your home, navigate, detect obstacles, and look for dirt. The main vacuum is the most powerful iRobot has made, comparable to an upright vacuum and capable of steam-mopping with 46 newtons of downward pressure. It can also clean up solid messes, such as pasta from a carpet.
While the Duo is a new approach for a consumer home robot, it resembles commercial cleaning bots used in hotels or malls. However, it doesn’t feel like a good fit for a home. The mechanical raising and lowering worked well in the demos, but concerns about long-term durability remain. As a concept bot, the Duo has no price or release date, and exact details of how it will operate are still being developed.
The Roomba Duo is certainly a bold step for iRobot, but only time will tell if it’s a step too far. The new CEO, Hao Li, says the future of floor care has a familiar name, but for now, we’ll just have to wait and see if this familiar name will become a household staple.







