Roomba’s hockey-puck shape was chosen to slide under furniture and turn in place.
iRobot’s founders, Rodney Brooks, Colin Angle and Helen Greiner, spent years building military and space robots, including the bomb-disposal PackBot. Launching the Roomba in 2002, they made it flat to slide under furniture and round to pivot. In 2022 Amazon agreed to buy iRobot for about $1.7 billion, and in 2024 the deal collapsed under antitrust objections.
Roomba on Brandseum