iRobot's in trouble and I hope we don't lose Roomba, the original and arguably best robot vacuum

We have some history, iRobot and I, or at least Roomba, the first consumer-grade, commercially viable robot vacuum, and I do. So when I read the news that iRobot was so cash-strapped it might have to cease operations, a wave a sadness washed over me.

Perhaps this feeling was intensified because the news arrived as I was finishing Joseph L. Jones' new book Dancing with Roomba. Jones, one of iRobot's earliest employees and an original engineer behind Roomba (an MIT Scientist, the robot vacuum was basically Jones' and a colleague's idea).

The book recounts a decades-long quest to build a floor-cleaning robot that was littered with false starts and failures. The number of companies that actually unveiled robot vacuums only to fail to deliver a single unit to consumers is startling. It's those efforts, in part, that make iRobot's accomplishment in 2002 ...