Roomba: From a Lego Prototype Called Dust Puppy to the Smithsonian

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In 1989, MIT engineer Joe Jones built a robotic vacuum out of Lego bricks and nicknamed it Dust Puppy. Corporate America wanted nothing to do with it. Denning Mobile Robot Company said no, Bissell passed, and the idea stalled for a decade until S.C. Johnson funded development through a young company called iRobot in 1999, then pulled out just before manufacturing. iRobot pressed on alone, renamed the machine Roomba, and launched it in September 2002 with three buttons for room size.

This episode follows the Roomba from an insect-brained gadget that pinballed around living rooms to a camera-guided, self-emptying system. Along the way come the random walk algorithm inspired by Rodney Brooks, the infamous pet waste disasters that forced a rethink of navigation, black carpets mistaken for cliffs, and a hacker community that iRobot chose to embrace instead of sue. It is the story of how a vacuum taught people to share their homes with autonomous machines.

• The first Roomba mapped nothing. It spiraled outward, followed walls, and bounced off furniture at random angles, a cheap approach that beat pricey sonar rivals like the Electrolux Trilobite.
• Total floor coverage had a dark side: a Roomba that met a dog accident would spread it across the whole house, an event the internet dubbed the Poopocalypse.
• The 900 series in 2015 added VSLAM, pairing a floor-tracking infrared sensor with an upward camera that used ceiling landmarks to correct drift.
• Infrared cliff sensors kept robots off the stairs but read dark rugs as a bottomless drop, so early machines refused to clean black carpet.
• After hobbyists tapped a hidden serial port for light painting and mapping projects, iRobot released the Create, a Roomba with the vacuum removed and a cargo bay in its place.