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Amazon left Roomba with a huge mess to clean up
By abandoning iRobot, Amazon may have doomed the Roomba.
In the last decade, Chinese companies like Ecovacs (Deebot / Yeedi), Anker (Eufy), Roborock (backed by Xiaomi), and Dreame Technology have burst onto the global market with cheaper, flashier options. It was one of the first to bring effective room mapping to move bots on from their bump-and-roll randomness, and it has led the way in developing reliable AI algorithms for avoiding household objects like socks, phone cables, and pet waste. Potentially, it was these efforts at making the robot floor cleaner smarter, plowing money into R&D around intelligence rather than churning out more mass-market products like its competitors, that put iRobot in its current precarious position.
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