iRobot unveils the Roomba Duo

Are two robots better than one? The Duo carries a second robot vacuum that it can lower via a mechanical arm.

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The original robot vacuum company showed off a concept robot at the IFA tech show in Berlin today. The Roomba Duo combines a heavy-duty floor-washing machine with a smaller, slimmer Roomba. The two floor cleaners 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, according to iRobot’s Adam Pope, and is more comparable capability-wise to an upright vacuum. It can also steam-mop with a large roller mop using 46 newtons of downward pressure. The Duo can also clean up solid messes — I watched a demo where it sucked up pasta from a carpet, and proceeded to wash the carpet. Pope said it’s the most powerful vacuum the company has made.

The smaller unit is the Roomba Plus 757 , which sits on top and is deployed by a mechanical arm that lowers it to clean spaces the main unit can’t reach.

iRobot’s new CEO, Hao Li, presented the Duo, saying the innovation proved, “The future of floor care has a familiar name.” Hao Li is from iRobot’s parent company, Picea, which purchased iRobot out of bankruptcy earlier this year.

The Roomba Duo is certainly a new approach for a consumer home robot. However, it resembles the commercial cleaning bots you might see in hotels or malls (minus the extra robot on top), and doesn’t feel like a good fit for a home. But if you already have a robot vacuum, a stick vac, a carpet cleaner, and a floor washing device, the Duo would combine everything into one.

The mechanical raising and lowering worked well in the demos I saw. It looked smooth and was relatively fast. It resembled the mechanism on iRobot’s first robot vacuum mop, the J7 Combo, which lowered its mop down when needed . Only this is on a much larger scale. I do have concerns about long-term durability.

As a concept bot, the Roomba Duo has no price or release date, and I wasn’t allowed to touch it or look inside. Several engineers from Picea were babysitting the device, and it required two people to carry it back and forth from the demo.

I wasn’t able to get a full rundown of specs, as exact details of how it will operate are still being developed. Pope said they plan to consider feedback they get as they continue to develop the device.

Photos by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

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