Robot Vacuum Cleaner History and ABB AMR Lessons

The robot vacuum cleaner is the one home robot most people already own, and it took more than forty years of false starts to get there. This post traces the job from horse-drawn vacuum wagons and the first electric sweepers to Electrolux's Trilobite and iRobot's Roomba. It then looks at the lidar mapping, mopping docks and robotic arms on this autumn's models, and at what floor robots share with ABB's Flexley Mover AMRs, which find their way around factories with a similar map-and-locate approach. The last part covers where both are heading and what still goes wrong.

A robot vacuum docked at its charging station against a living room wall, 2021. Photo: Ajay Suresh / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

From Puffing Billy to the first robot vacuums

Before any robot, cleaning floors meant brooms, carpet beaters and a lot of kneeling. In 1901 the British engineer Hubert Cecil Booth and the American inventor David T. Kenney each built powered suction cleaners. Booth's machine, nicknamed Puffing Billy, was so big that it was pulled by horses and parked outside the house while hoses went in through the windows. In 1907 James Murray Spangler, a department store janitor in Canton, Ohio, built a portable electric sweeper with a rotating brush and patented it in 1908. The Hoover company turned his design into a household product.

A Dutch housewife beats a doormat with a rattan carpet beater, the way rugs were cleaned before vacuums. Photo: Nationaal Archief via Wikimedia Commons (no known copyright restrictions)

The idea of a vacuum that runs itself came early. In his 1956 novel The Door into Summer, Robert A. Heinlein described one that cleaned all day and went back to its stall to recharge. A year later the engineer Donald Moore filed a patent for robot appliances that followed a track laid under the floor, and Whirlpool showed the concept at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow without ever selling it. In 1985 the toy maker Tomy sold the Dustbot, a small toy robot with a built-in vacuum that turned when it sensed an edge or hit something.

Housework in a Finnish home in 1950, with the vacuum cleaner out. Photo: Erkki Voutilainen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

The first real products arrived around the turn of the century. Electrolux showed an early Trilobite on the BBC programme Tomorrow's World in 1997 and later sold it for about 1,800 dollars. It worked, but it bumped into furniture, stopped short of walls and missed small areas, and it was discontinued. Dyson built a robot called the DC06 in 2001 but never sold it because of the cost. iRobot, founded in 1990 by Colin Angle, Helen Greiner and Rodney Brooks, launched the Roomba in 2002. It turned at obstacles, spotted dirty patches and avoided stairs, and it became the first robot vacuum to sell well.

An Electrolux Trilobite, one of the first robot vacuums on sale, photographed in 2006. Photo: Patrik Tschudin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Lidar, mopping docks and arms on the 2026 models

Early Roombas cleaned in random patterns. Neato's XV-11 changed that in 2010 with a spinning laser that mapped the room so the robot could clean in straight lines, and Dyson and iRobot added camera mapping in 2015. By 2016 iRobot said robots made up a fifth of vacuum cleaner sales worldwide. Most of today's machines combine a lidar map with a camera that spots socks and cables, and a dock that empties the bin, washes the mop pads and refills water. In a 23 September review, Popular Mechanics wrote that the Eufy Omni S2 matched the suction of a cordless stick vacuum and sanitized the floors as it mopped.

A Neato XV-11, which in 2010 brought laser mapping to robot vacuums; the turret on top holds the laser. Photo: Autopilot / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The newest trick is an arm. DJI launched its ROMO 2 series on 3 September 2026 with what it calls a lidar-guided adaptive robotic arm that swings out across a 123 degree arc to reach under low furniture, and legs that climb single steps up to 4 cm high. Roborock's Saros Z70 carries a folding arm that can pick up light objects such as socks before the robot vacuums. Prices have spread out a lot. DJI lists the ROMO 2 at 2,899 dollars, while PCMag flagged a Roomba vacuum and mop deal at 57 percent off just before Prime Day in October.

A Roborock robot vacuum with its self-emptying dock on display in a shop, 2024. Photo: Ssu / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not make robot vacuums, but its Flexley Mover AMRs face the same problem on a bigger scale: knowing where they are in a space that keeps changing. ABB bought the Spanish AMR maker ASTI Mobile Robotics in 2021, and models such as the Flexley Mover P604 navigate with 3D Visual SLAM, building a map from camera images instead of following tape or magnets on the floor. A robot vacuum does a smaller version of the same thing with its lidar or camera. Both have to cope with moved furniture or pallets, people walking past, and floors that look different from day to day. Our post on robots in unseen homes covers why that is still hard.

The ABB Flexley Mover P604, which navigates with 3D Visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

Where floor cleaning robots go next

The arm is the big change coming to home floor robots. A vacuum that can move a shoe, pick up a toy or open a low door clears the clutter that makes owners tidy up before every run. Grasping odd objects is something industrial robot makers have worked on for decades. Mobile manipulators that put an arm on an AMR already exist in factories, and ABB has shown concepts that pair its arms with mobile bases. Shrinking that into a floor robot is a different engineering job, and ABB has announced nothing of the kind, so treat it as a possibility.

ABB's mobile YuMi concept, a dual arm robot on a wheeled base, in a hospital lab corridor. Photo: ABB

Commercial buildings are the middle ground. Offices, airports and stores already run larger autonomous scrubbers at night, and in September CNET watched a floor washing robot deploy a Roomba from its own body using a mechanical arm. Cleaning robots in shared spaces need the same safety rules as factory AMRs: slow down near people, stop for an obstacle and report where they are. Teams that build these fleets plan routes and zones in simulation first, much like engineers lay out AMR traffic and no-code robot programs for a plant.

An ABB Flexley Mover P603 carrying crates. Photo: ABB

Price is the first open problem. A top model with a dock and an arm costs close to 3,000 dollars, and pads, filters and batteries add running costs. Privacy is the second. Cameras that map a home also record it, and in September The Conversation published an article on how a robot vacuum's data could be used as evidence in court. Reliability still trails the marketing. Cables and dark rugs still trip up some models, and owners still find their robot stuck under a sofa now and then. Cheaper arms and better object recognition are what makers are betting on to cut those rescue trips.

A Dyson 360 Eye, which used a 360 degree camera to map rooms, on a rug in 2017. Photo: Lombroso / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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