The dream of robotic floor care has always been for it to be hands-off and mind-off. That is, for a robot to live in your house that will keep your floors clean without you having to really do anything or even think about it. When it comes to robot vacuuming, that’s been more or less solved thanks to self-emptying robots that transfer debris into docking stations, which iRobot pioneered with the Roomba i7+ in 2018. By 2022, iRobot’s Combo j7+ added an intelligent mopping pad to the mix, which definitely made for cleaner floors but was also a step backwards in the sense that you had to remember to toss the pad into your washing machine and fill the robot’s clean water reservoir every time. The Combo j9+ stuffed a clean water reservoir into the dock itself, which could top off the robot with water by itself for a month.

With the new Roomba Combo 10 Max, announced today, iRobot has cut out (some of) that annoying process thanks to a massive new docking station that self-empties vacuum debris, empties dirty mop water, refills clean mop water, and then washes and dries the mopping pad, completely autonomously.

iRobot

The Roomba part of this is a mildly upgraded j7+, and most of what’s new on the hardware side here is in the “multifunction AutoWash Dock.” This new dock is a beast: It empties the robot of all of the dirt and debris picked up by the vacuum, refills the Roomba’s clean water tank from a reservoir, and then starts up a wet scrubby system down under the bottom of the dock. The Roomba deploys its dirty mopping pad onto that system, and then drives back and forth while the scrubby system cleans the pad. All the dirty water from this process gets sucked back up into a dedicated reservoir inside the dock, and the pad gets blow-dried while the scrubby system runs a self-cleaning cycle.

The dock removes debris from the vacuum, refills it with clean water, and then uses water to wash the mopping pad.iRobot

This means that as a user, you’ve only got to worry about three things: dumping out the dirty water tank every week (if you use the robot for mopping most days), filling the clean water tank every week, and then changing out the debris every two months. That is not a lot of hands-on time for having consistently clean floors.

The other thing to keep in mind about all of these robots is that they do need relatively frequent human care if you want them to be happy and successful. That means flipping them over and getting into their guts to clean out the bearings and all that stuff. iRobot makes this very easy to do, and it’s a necessary part of robot ownership, so the dream of having a robot that you can actually forget completely is probably not achievable.

The consequence for this convenience is a real chonker of a dock. The dock is basically furniture, and to the company’s credit, iRobot designed it so that the top surface is useable as a shelf—Access to the guts of the dock are from the front, not the top. This is fine, but it’s also kind of crazy just how much these docks have expanded, especially once you factor in the front ramp that the robot drives up, which sticks out even farther.

The Roomba will detect carpet and lift its mopping pad up to prevent drips.iRobot

We asked iRobot director of project management Warren Fernandez about whether docks are just going to keep on getting bigger forever until we’re all just living in giant robot docks, to which he said: “Are you going to continue to see some large capable multifunction docks out there in the market? Yeah, I absolutely think you will—but when does big become too big?” Fernandez says that there are likely opportunities to reduce dock size going forward through packaging efficiencies or dual-purpose components, but that there’s another option, too: Distributed docks. “If a robot has dry capabilities and wet capabilities, do those have to coexist inside the same chassis? What if they were separate?” says Fernandez.

We should mention that iRobot is not the first in the robotic floor care robot space to have a self-cleaning mop, and it’s also not the first to think about distributed docks, although as Fernandez explains, this is a more common approach in Asia where you can also take advantage of home plumbing integration. “It’s a major trend in China, and starting to pop up a little bit in Europe, but not really in North America yet. How amazing could it be if you had a dock that, in a very easy manner, was able to tap right into plumbing lines for water supply and sewage disposal?”

According to Fernandez, this tends to be much easier to do in China, both because the labor cost for plumbing work is far lower than in the United States and Europe, and also because it’s fairly common for apartments in China to have accessible floor drains. “We don’t really yet see it in a major way at a global level,” Fernandez tells us. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not coming.”

The robot autonomously switches mopping mode on and off for different floor surfaces.iRobot

We should also mention the Roomba Combo 10 Max, which includes some software updates:

• The front-facing camera and specialized bin sensors can identify dirtier areas eight times as effectively as before.
• The Roomba can identify specific rooms and prioritize the order they’re cleaned in, depending on how dirty they get.
• A new cleaning behavior called “Smart Scrub” adds a back-and-forth scrubbing motion for floors that need extra oomph.

And here’s what I feel like the new software should do, but doesn’t:

• Use the front-facing camera and bin sensors to identify dirtier areas and then autonomously develop a schedule to more frequently clean those areas.
• Activate Smart Scrub when the camera and bin sensors recognize an especially dirty floor.

I say “should do” because the robot appears to be collecting the data that it needs to do these things but it doesn’t do them yet. New features (especially new features that involve autonomy) take time to develop and deploy, but imagine a robot that makes much more nuanced decisions about where and when to clean based on very detailed real-time data and environmental understanding that iRobot has already implemented.

I also appreciate that even as iRobot is emphasizing autonomy and leveraging data to start making more decisions for the user, the company is also making sure that the user has as much control as possible through the app. For example, you can set the robot to mop your floor without vacuuming first, even though if you do that, all you’re going to end up with a much dirtier mop. Doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense, but if that’s what you want, iRobot has empowered you to do it.

The dock opens from the front for access to the clean- and dirty-water storage and the dirt bag.iRobot

The Roomba Combo 10 Max will be launching in August for US $1,400. That’s expensive, but it’s also how iRobot does things: A new Roomba with new tech always gets flagship status and premium cost. Sooner or later it’ll be affordable enough that the rest of us will be able to afford it, too.

A lot has happened in robotics over the last year. Everyone is wondering how AI will transform robotics, and everyone else is wondering whether humanoids are going to blow it or not, and the rest of us are busy trying not to get completely run over as things shake out however they’re going to shake out.

Meanwhile, over at Hello Robot, they’ve been focused on making their Stretch robot do useful things while also being affordable and reliable and affordable and expandable and affordable and community-friendly and affordable. Which are some really hard and important problems that can sometimes get overwhelmed by flashier things.

Today, Hello Robot is announcing Stretch 3, which provides a suite of upgrades to what they (quite accurately) call “the world’s only lightweight, capable, developer-friendly mobile manipulator.” And impressively, they’ve managed to do it without forgetting about that whole “affordable” part.

Hello Robot

Stretch 3 looks about the same as the previous versions, but there are important upgrades that are worth highlighting. The most impactful: Stretch 3 now comes with the dexterous wrist kit that used to be an add-on, and it now also includes an Intel Realsense D405 camera mounted right behind the gripper, which is a huge help for both autonomy and remote teleoperation—a useful new feature shipping with Stretch 3 that’s based on research out of Maya Cakmak’s lab at the University of Washington, in Seattle. This is an example of turning innovation from the community of Stretch users into product features, a product-development approach that seems to be working well for Hello Robot.

“We’ve really been learning from our community,” says Hello Robot cofounder and CEO Aaron Edsinger. “In the past year, we’ve seen a real uptick in publications, and it feels like we’re getting to this critical-mass moment with Stretch. So with Stretch 3, it’s about implementing features that our community has been asking us for.”

“When we launched, we didn’t have a dexterous wrist at the end as standard, because we were trying to start with truly the minimum viable product,” says Hello Robot cofounder and CTO Charlie Kemp. “And what we found is that almost every order was adding the dexterous wrist, and by actually having it come in standard, we’ve been able to devote more attention to it and make it a much more robust and capable system.”

Kemp says that having Stretch do everything right out of the box (with Hello Robot support) makes a big difference for their research customers. “Making it easier for people to try things—we’ve learned to really value that, because the more steps that people have to go through to experience it, the less likely they are to build on it.” In a research context, this is important because what you’re really talking about is time: The more time people spend just trying to make the robot function, the less time they’ll spend getting the robot to do useful things.

Hello Robot

At this point, you may be thinking of Stretch as a research platform. Or you may be thinking of Stretch as a robot for people with disabilities, if you read our November 2023 cover story about Stretch and Henry and Jane Evans. And the robot is definitely both of those things. But Hello Robot stresses that these specific markets are not their end goal—they see Stretch as a generalist mobile manipulator with a future in the home, as suggested by this Stretch 3 promo video:

Hello Robot

Dishes, laundry, bubble cannons: All of these are critical to the functionality of any normal household. “Stretch is an inclusive robot,” says Kemp. “It’s not just for older adults or people with disabilities. We want a robot that can be beneficial for everyone. Our vision, and what we believe will really happen, whether it’s us or someone else, is that there is going to be a versatile, general-purpose home robot. Right now, clearly, our market is not yet consumers in the home. But that’s where we want to go.”

Robots in the home have been promised for decades, and with the notable exception of the Roomba, there has not been a lot of success. The idea of a robot that could handle dishes or laundry is tempting, but is it near-term or medium-term realistic? Edsinger, who has been at this whole robots thing for a very long time, is an optimist about this, and about the role that Stretch will play. “There are so many places where you can see the progress happening—in sensing, in manipulation,” Edsinger says. “I can imagine those things coming together now in a way that I could not have 5 to 10 years ago, when it seemed so incredibly hard.”

“We’re very pragmatic about what is possible. And I think that we do believe that things are changing faster than we anticipated—10 years ago, I had a pretty clear linear path in mind for robotics, but it’s hard to really imagine where we’ll be in terms of robot capabilities 10 years from now.” —Aaron Edsinger, Hello Robot

I’d say that it’s still incredibly hard, but Edsinger is right that a lot of the pieces do seem to be coming together. Arguably, the hardware is the biggest challenge here, because working in a home puts heavy constraints on what kind of hardware you’re able to use. You’re not likely to see a humanoid in a home anytime soon, because they’d actually be dangerous, and even a quadruped is likely to be more trouble than it’s worth in a home environment. Hello Robot is conscious of this, and that’s been one of the main drivers of the design of Stretch.

“I think the portability of Stretch is really worth highlighting because there’s just so much value in that which is maybe not obvious,” Edsinger tells us. Being able to just pick up and move a mobile manipulator is not normal. Stretch’s weight (24.5 kilograms) is almost trivial to work with, in sharp contrast with virtually every other mobile robot with an arm: Stretch fits into places that humans fit into, and manages to have a similar workspace as well, and its bottom-heavy design makes it safe for humans to be around. It can’t climb stairs, but it can be carried upstairs, which is a bigger deal than it may seem. It’ll fit in the back of a car, too. Stretch is built to explore the world—not just some facsimile of the world in a research lab.

“NYU students have been taking Stretch into tens of homes around New York,” says Edsinger. “They carried one up a four-story walk-up. This enables real in-home data collection. And this is where home robots will start to happen—when you can have hundreds of these out there in homes collecting data for machine learning.”

“That’s where the opportunity is,” adds Kemp. “It’s that engagement with the world about where to apply the technology beneficially. And if you’re in a lab, you’re not going to find it.”

We’ve seen some compelling examples of this recently, with Mobile ALOHA. These are robots learning to be autonomous by having humans teleoperate them through common household skills. But the system isn’t particularly portable, and it costs nearly US $32,000 in parts alone. Don’t get me wrong: I love the research. It’s just going to be difficult to scale, and in order to collect enough data to effectively tackle the world, scale is critical. Stretch is much easier to scale, because you can just straight up buy one.

Or two! You may have noticed that some of the Stretch 3 videos have two robots in them, collaborating with each other. This is not yet autonomous, but with two robots, a single human (or a pair of humans) can teleoperate them as if they were effectively a single two-armed robot:

Hello Robot

Essentially, what you’ve got here is a two-armed robot that (very intentionally) has nothing to do with humanoids. As Kemp explains: “We’re trying to help our community and the world see that there is a different path from the human model. We humans tend to think of the preexisting solution: People have two arms, so we think, well, I’m going to need to have two arms on my robot or it’s going to have all these issues.” Kemp points out that robots like Stretch have shown that really quite a lot of things can be done with only one arm, but two arms can still be helpful for a substantial subset of common tasks. “The challenge for us, which I had just never been able to find a solution for, was how you get two arms into a portable, compact, affordable lightweight mobile manipulator. You can’t!”

But with two Stretches, you have not only two arms but also two shoulders that you can put wherever you want. Washing a dish? You’ll probably want two arms close together for collaborative manipulation. Making a bed? Put the two arms far apart to handle both sides of a sheet at once. It’s a sort of distributed on-demand bimanual manipulation, which certainly adds a little bit of complexity but also solves a bunch of problems when it comes to practical in-home manipulation. Oh—and if those teleop tools look like modified kitchen tongs, that’s because they’re modified kitchen tongs.

Of course, buying two Stretch robots is twice as expensive as buying a single Stretch robot, and even though Stretch 3’s cost of just under $25,000 is very inexpensive for a mobile manipulator and very affordable in a research or education context, we’re still pretty far from something that most people would be able to afford for themselves. Hello Robot says that producing robots at scale is the answer here, which I’m sure is true, but it can be a difficult thing for a small company to achieve.

Moving slowly toward scale is at least partly intentional, Kemp tells us. “We’re still in the process of discovering Stretch’s true form—what the robot really should be. If we tried to scale to make lots and lots of robots at a much lower cost before we fundamentally understood what the needs and challenges were going to be, I think it would be a mistake. And there are many gravestones out there for various home-robotics companies, some of which I truly loved. We don’t want to become one of those.”

This is not to say that Hello Robot isn’t actively trying to make Stretch more affordable, and Edsinger suggests that the next iteration of the robot will be more focused on that. But—and this is super important—Kemp tells us that Stretch has been, is, and will continue to be sustainable for Hello Robot: “We actually charge what we should be charging to be able to have a sustainable business.” In other words, Hello Robot is not relying on some nebulous scale-defined future to transition into a business model that can develop, sell, and support robots. They can do that right now while keeping the lights on. “Our sales have enough margin to make our business work,” says Kemp. “That’s part of our discipline.”