This robot vacuum takes photos as it cleans

Twenty years after the introduction of the very first Roomba, robot vacuums have moved on from being a niche luxury to being relatively common. And its creators, iRobots, are not done adding capabilities.

The latest version expands on the robot vacuum toolset with a few new impressive tricks and smarts, but also widens the kinds of data your automated friend may scoop up alongside the dust and dirt as it moves around your home. Which is sure to be of particular concern to privacy advocates, as iRobot may soon be acquired by renowned information hoarder Amazon.

At $2200 the Roomba Combo J7+ is a big investment as far as robot cleaners go, but it also pulls out all the stops. It has a retractable mop pad so it can automatically transition from vacuuming and mopping on hard floors to only vacuuming on carpets, removing the need for human intervention and ensuring your carpets stay dry. It returns to its “clean base” of its own initiative to charge, and to eject dirt into a bag so you hardly ever have to empty anything out into the bin manually. And it maintains a map of your floor that you can mark up with room names, no-go zones and extra dirty places that need special attention, for a customised clean.

All this stuff together makes for a pretty comprehensive robo-vac. You can of course just press its button and let it clean the whole floor, like you’ve always been able to with Roombas. But you can also create lists of specific cleaning jobs using the app, and activate them with a button, on a schedule or with a spoken word to Alexa or Google. So you could set it to clean under the kitchen table at 8pm every night, while you’re putting the kids to bed. Or if you happen to dump half a box of Rice Bubbles on the floor — to take a random example — you can call out and have the robot just vac that specific spot.

If you allow the app to monitor your location, you can even have the robot do its daily cleaning only when you’re out of the house, putting itself away when you’re home, so it seems like you just magically have clean floors.

In practice there are of course some hiccups. You still need to declutter the floor before the vacuum does its thing, because it’s better but not perfect at avoiding debris it’s not expecting to be there. It also does not have a way of replenishing its own water supply for the mop, so if you don’t remember to fill it you might get halfway to the shops and then get a notification on your phone pleading for a top-up.

And speaking of notifications, the Combo has a camera and a light on the front that it uses to detect objects it might need to avoid, but it also uses it to send you photos of stuff it’s not sure about.

That’s pretty weird for a robot vacuum (and it’s also a bit confronting to see what the deep underneath of my entertainment centre looks like), but by giving feedback on these pictures you can help it learn new kinds of temporary obstacles it might find around your home, or identify places it just shouldn’t try to go.

Twenty years after the introduction of the very first Roomba, robot vacuums have moved on from being a niche luxury to being relatively common. And its creators, iRobots, are not done adding capabilities.

The latest version expands on the robot vacuum toolset with a few new impressive tricks and smarts, but also widens the kinds of data your automated friend may scoop up alongside the dust and dirt as it moves around your home. Which is sure to be of particular concern to privacy advocates, as iRobot may soon be acquired by renowned information hoarder Amazon.

At $2200 the Roomba Combo J7+ is a big investment as far as robot cleaners go, but it also pulls out all the stops. It has a retractable mop pad so it can automatically transition from vacuuming and mopping on hard floors to only vacuuming on carpets, removing the need for human intervention and ensuring your carpets stay dry. It returns to its “clean base” of its own initiative to charge, and to eject dirt into a bag so you hardly ever have to empty anything out into the bin manually. And it maintains a map of your floor that you can mark up with room names, no-go zones and extra dirty places that need special attention, for a customised clean.

All this stuff together makes for a pretty comprehensive robo-vac. You can of course just press its button and let it clean the whole floor, like you’ve always been able to with Roombas. But you can also create lists of specific cleaning jobs using the app, and activate them with a button, on a schedule or with a spoken word to Alexa or Google. So you could set it to clean under the kitchen table at 8pm every night, while you’re putting the kids to bed. Or if you happen to dump half a box of Rice Bubbles on the floor — to take a random example — you can call out and have the robot just vac that specific spot.

If you allow the app to monitor your location, you can even have the robot do its daily cleaning only when you’re out of the house, putting itself away when you’re home, so it seems like you just magically have clean floors.

In practice there are of course some hiccups. You still need to declutter the floor before the vacuum does its thing, because it’s better but not perfect at avoiding debris it’s not expecting to be there. It also does not have a way of replenishing its own water supply for the mop, so if you don’t remember to fill it you might get halfway to the shops and then get a notification on your phone pleading for a top-up.

And speaking of notifications, the Combo has a camera and a light on the front that it uses to detect objects it might need to avoid, but it also uses it to send you photos of stuff it’s not sure about.

That’s pretty weird for a robot vacuum (and it’s also a bit confronting to see what the deep underneath of my entertainment centre looks like), but by giving feedback on these pictures you can help it learn new kinds of temporary obstacles it might find around your home, or identify places it just shouldn’t try to go.