Stories that feature Roomba.
Projects don’t follow straight lines. I’ve never participated in a development that proceeded logically along preplanned steps from beginning to end. Always there are false starts and dead ends. Roomba was no exception. The product eventually purchased by millions of customers differed in several… Read More »Roomba and the Cutting Room Floor
With great expectations my coauthor, Tom Fitzgerald, and I sat down for a meeting with iRobot’s CEO. The time was early 2003 and, since just before Roomba’s launch the previous year, Tom and I had been working on a book titled Making… Read More »Dancing with Roomba, A History
Having Roombas built in an offshore factory was by no means as simple as emailing a folder of design files to our contract manufacturer. Much information needed to be exchanged between the parties, much training needed to occur, and many kinks… Read More »Define Bed
The first version of Roomba to hit the market was more popular than we developers had dared hope. An initial factory-order for 15,000 turned quickly into an order for 25,000 followed by orders for many, many more. The company decided… Read More »The Red Roomba Mystery
