Roomba Opening the Door
Amazon announced last week that it was acquiring iRobot, maker of the popular Roomba series of robots. It makes a lot of sense. Amazon is moving further into the home automation space and it already owns a robotics company, albeit one for warehouse robots.
With Roomba, Amazon can potentially get much more data on what’s happening in peoples’ homes and what they might do to improve improve interactions with other devices. They already have one type of home robot, the Astro, and another in the Day 1 Edition (maybe to be released) that’s a drone from Ring.
With iRobot, the know-how could merge into much more capable devices that vacuum, monitor, and maybe even dust the ceiling fan. Another possibility is bringing in Amazon deliveries, or opening the door for home services and chaperoning people around the home.
The signal is that Amazon wants to keep playing in the space. They make have purchased iRobot for the patents and the brand, either because they see a new opportunity or to keep other players like Google out of the space.
Let’s hope this means some newer, better cleaning gadgets in the coming years.
