Faced with a deluge of Chinese competitors, debt issues and the collapse of a sale to Amazon, American home robotics company iRobot is in some trouble at the moment at the corporate level, and all the import tariffs of the rainbow may not be able to help, since iRobot manufactures in Asia.
But in product terms, the Roomba line, whose name has been shorthand for robovacs for years, has never looked better, even if the company seems to be leaving the bleeding-edge innovation in this space to others.
iRobot sent out a practical, midrange offering for me to put through the torture test of living with my family and our extravagantly disgraceful living standards: the Roomba Plus 505 Combo Robot & AutoWash Dock.
iRobot
Spec sheet highlights here include:
- Twin DualClean mop pads that reach out on a little arm to mop right up against walls and into corners
- A higher-end, but not outrageous 7,000 Pa of suction power – enough for houses with lots of carpet
- A docking/charging station that auto-empties the dust canister, and washes and heat-dries the mops
- LiDAR mapping with the alleged ability to recognize furniture, as well as obstacles from cords and cables to steps, socks and those artless crayons of the animal kingdom: dog turds.
Nothing too crazy, just a solid, well-priced Roomba with proper LiDAR-based navigation and integrated mopping/vacuuming – two things that, as The Hustle points out, iRobot held off on for far too long. The current range, announced in March 2025, represents a major strategic pivot for the company, and perhaps a bit of humble pie, but it’s a good move. Machines like the 505 Combo are much closer to what customers expect in the mid-2020s.
So how’s it go? Well, superficially, the first thing I noticed was pleasant: after testing a bunch of Chinese competitors lately from the likes of Narwal, Roborock and Eureka, I have to admit my inner grammar Nazi finds it soothing to use a device that’s a native English speaker and doesn’t speak in mangled translations.
iRobot
The app is surprisingly minimalist, which makes it easy to use and thus perhaps a friendlier gift for your aging parents if they’re not tech lovers. But it’s also missing some options I’d have liked to tinker with, like mop wetness, which we’ll get to later, and how often the Roomba pops back to the dock to empty out its dustbin.
Mapping is pretty quick and uneventful, although the results did need some cleaning up and tweaking in my case. I’m happy to give all robovacs a pass on this; the instructions are always clear that it needs to be done with a clear floor, and the day I see a clear floor throughout this entire house, I’ll be pinching myself too hard to go configuring robots.
Instead, I get them to map it out according to the bare floor available on the day, letting it gradually dawn on them what kind of life they’re in for, and hoping they can fill in the gaps as the mess fluctuates. This does tend to cause some confusion, so I need to go back into the map, join and separate rooms, and edit out phantom areas where the robots have stood in front of mirrors and interpreted them as large, inaccessible spaces. This is never a lot of fun in a mobile app, but it’s also my fault, so the Roomba scores a par for the course in mapping.
iRobot
Cleaning performance is around par as well. On carpets, it pays to go for the deeper clean settings and give it multiple passes, but in general it picks up a satisfying amount of guff, takes it back to the dock and self-empties into a disposable bag that should last well over a month, maybe even two, without needing any attention. Personally, I’d look into replacing that with a reusable bag with a zip on it.
As for mopping… Well, as mentioned above, the minimalist app doesn’t give you the option to play with how much water it uses. To my eye, I feel like this little Roomba could crank things up a bit sometimes.
Having said that, hard floors do end up looking nice, the extending arm does push the rotating mop pads right up against wall edges, and impressively deep into the corners too… And the result at the end of the day is a truly grotesque dirty water container, which does feel like a job well done.
Loz Blain/New Atlas
Otherwise, well… You know, I can’t say I’ve really formed much of a relationship with this device over the last month or two of testing, but that’s mainly because it hasn’t asked for much of my attention. Indeed, that’s probably my primary impression; the 505 gets the job done without a ton of intervention.
That in itself is a verdict of high praise to begin from, but it’s not to say you can ignore the 505 completely. Let’s pick some nits.
Firstly, I’ve still occasionally had to rescue it from choking on the odd sock, necklace, USB cable, hair clip, emery board or long piece of string. That’s another par for the course, and a challenge that no robovac I’ve tried has completely mastered, no matter how many sensors and cameras or how allegedly clever the AI. But most of the time, the 505 flags obstacles and avoids them like it says on the tin, and I’d rank it at the better end of the units I’ve tried in terms of intelligence.
iRobot
Secondly, it doesn’t deal with long hair nearly as well as the Narwals in my little test fleet, which use single-sided main roller brushes that roll hair up into loops and flick them off into the maw of the vacuum. The Roomba’s double-sided brush mounts gradually build up a tangle at either end, eventually requiring you to pull the ends off the roller and dig all the hair out. This, incidentally, is something I had to figure out for myself, not being able to find it in the online manuals.
Thirdly, it’s not as impressive around small steps moving between rooms and surfaces as, say, the flagship Roborock monster, which rises up on struts like a low-rider and sort of wheelies over such things (and costs much, much more). The Roomba is a little clunky in this regard, but it gets where it’s going.
Fourthly, and weirdly, at one point it developed a habit of losing its single edge-sweeping brush mid-clean, leading to a few annoying hunts around the house to find where it had dropped off. This seems to have resolved itself in recent weeks, but I can’t say I understand why or what’s changed.
One other small thing to mention is that it doesn’t vacuum while it commutes, or while it’s entering or leaving its dock. So you can sometimes end up with the dock itself looking dirty. That would be an easy enough fix for a software upgrade…
Loz Blain / New Atlas
The biggest complaint I’d level at the Roomba 505, though, is that it’s noisy. They’re all noisy in terms of suction, mind you, especially when you crank them up to their highest settings. But the 505 augments this with more low-pitched chattering and shuddering sounds than the others I’ve tested, enough that I initially thought it might’ve had something stuck in it. Nope, it’s just noisy.
That’s kind of odd to me, given that this unit doesn’t use the double counter-rotating rollers that once formed a key part of Roomba’s patented secret sauce. But it hasn’t been a big deal either, really, since I schedule most of this machine’s work for when nobody’s home anyway.
Originally launching at US$1,000, the Roomba Plus 505 Combo is now selling for closer to US$599 in the USA (Recommended retail is AU$1,699 in Australia, but similarly there’s a deal now at AU$999).
At those prices, I’d consider the 505 a great buy right now, as a solid midrange machine that’s currently available closer to low-end prices. I think it’s a good move that iRobot has jumped on board with LiDAR and combination vacuum/mopping, and while it still can’t wash the carpet, the current Roomba lineup seems headed in the right direction.
Source: iRobot Roomba