By John Keilman
Kayla Mederos adored her Roomba. She named it "WALL-E," after Pixar's trash-smashing space robot, and set it loose to collect the fur her yellow Labrador shed inside her Northern California home.
When WALL-E broke down, she returned it for a new one, only to see the same problem arise again and again. Finally, her brand loyalty exhausted, she switched to a robotic vacuum made by the Chinese company Roborock. It came with the pre-installed name of "Rocky," which was kind of a bummer.
But it turned out her love was transferable.
"Rocky is much quieter and does a good job," said Mederos, a 36-year-old high-school teacher. "I'm very fond of Rocky."
Long before there were chatbots and humanoids, there was the Roomba. The autonomous floor cleaner wasn't the first robotic vacuum on the market, but it became the best known, a gateway to a universe of gadgets that seem to have minds of their own.
"It's like a pet," said Lindsey Allen, 25, a tech content creator in Michigan who named hers Soup. "It moves around on its own. It can do its own thing without you controlling it."
Though Allen is happy with Soup, others have concluded their love has limits. Connoisseurs of robotic vacuums say cheaper, fancier competitors have run circles around the brand, which became better known for mishaps than clean floors. Videos abound of Roombas terrorizing pets, making epic messes and going AWOL.
Now the little sucker is broke. Roomba's parent company, Massachusetts-based iRobot, declared bankruptcy in December and will be taken over by the Chinese manufacturer that is its main creditor.
"They really couldn't keep up, which is unfortunate," said Sara Biggs, 40, who runs a YouTube channel dedicated to robotic vacuums. She did note, however, that what the brand lacked in features, it made up for in speed: When her family raced various vacuum models around their Jacksonville, Fla., home, Roombas always won.
iRobot declined to comment.
The first products to come out of iRobot were aimed at mine detection and space exploration, but it was the Roomba that defined the company. Joe Jones, who helped to invent the device in the late 1990s and has written a book about the experience, said it succeeded because iRobot kept it affordable: The first generation retailed for about $200.
Jones said he and his colleagues gave it a utilitarian design because they wanted consumers to regard it as a tool, not a toy.
"We deliberately avoided doing anything that made the robot sort of anthropomorphic," he said. "We didn't want googly eyes on the robot, nothing like that. So it did kind of surprise us when people seemed to feel very nurturing towards their robots."
Some humans show their love for their robotic cleaners with clever names like "Dirt Reynolds" and "Meryl Sweep." Others dress them up. Francesca Maniff runs a business making covers that give the vacuums the appearance of kittens, penguins and other cute animals.
"I lean into it being like a little buddy," she said.
Then there are the people who treat their Roombas like social media co-stars. Houston resident Helen Jürlau Arnold, 46, struck YouTube gold after her cat, Max-Arthur, took to riding atop a Roomba like it was a chariot. One video from 2013, showing the cat circling the kitchen while wearing a shark costume, has 13 million views.
Max-Arthur died in 2017. Arnold said none of her other cats has shown the same interest in the Roomba, though a feral orange cat named Garfield that joined the family last year is expressing some curiosity.
"He could have potential," she said. "I'll have to try it out."
The Roomba was riding high when Max-Arthur's videos were blowing up the internet; sales increased by double-digit percentages year after year. iRobot executives showed little fear of cheaper knockoffs, insisting that creating a quality robot vacuum was a forbiddingly difficult technological challenge.
That changed in a hurry. Chinese brands began to offer more advanced navigational capabilities and extra functions such as mopping, while Roombas were slow to evolve.
Angel Littlejohn, 54, said she got rid of her Roomba several years ago after it began to require frequent updates, regularly lost its way inside her St. Martinville, La., home and sometimes mistook a dark rug for the edge of a cliff.
She switched to a model made by Wyze, and though she says it works better, she has lost any fuzzy feelings she once had about the vacuums. Whereas she named her Roomba "Rosie," after the lovable robotic maid from "The Jetsons," she calls the new one "HAL," after the menacing, sentient computer in "2001: A Space Odyssey."
"No more cutesy names," said Littlejohn, an adjunct professor at a business college. "This is not cute anymore. I don't have time for this."
Write to John Keilman at john.keilman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 12, 2026 05:30 ET (10:30 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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