iRobot Completely Redesigns Its Floor Care Robots With New m6 and s9

It was just late last year that iRobot announced the i7, a top of the line Roomba that could map your home, remember those maps, clean the rooms that you wanted it to, and then dump all of the dirt that it picked up into a docking station so you didn’t need to even think about the robot for weeks, or even months. After testing out the i7, we found that it really did work as advertised. For the first time, you could have consistently cleaner floors with literally zero effort. Thanks, robots!

We thought, somewhat naively as it turns out, that iRobot would be content to take a little bit of a break; historically, the Roomba innovation and commercial release cycle hasn’t been particularly aggressive. The i7 seemed like a big enough step forward that iRobot would let folks adjust to the idea of a self-emptying Roomba, which is (to be fair) a pretty impressive engineering trick.

Instead, iRobot is completely overshadowing the Roomba i7 just nine months later with two new floor cleaning robots: the Braava m6, which is a beefed-up version of the Braava Jet with a mapping system in it; and the Roomba s9, a square-fronted (!) Roomba vacuum with a 3D sensor in the front to help it manage tricky areas of your home better than ever. The reason that both of these robots are being announced together is because they work as a team, communicating with each other to first vacuum your floors, and then mop them.