The 2019 Roomba gets an all-new design, companion mop-bot

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  The new iRobot Roomba S9+. It’s “D” shaped.

iRobot recently announced its yearly cleaning robot upgrades, and as usual, there is a new Roomba robo-vac, the Roomba S9+. This year, the company is also releasing a new, full-sized mop-bot, the Braava Jet M6.

First up, the vacuum. The big upgrade in the S9+ is an all-new shape. The Roomba ditches the iconic round puck design for a “D” shaped robot. This is copied straight from iRobot’s main rival, Neato Robotics, and as Neato has been saying for years, the D shape allows the robot to better get into the corners of your house.

The underside of the Roomba S9+ looks just like a Neato, with a cleaning brush pushed out to the edge of the robot and a corner-mounted rotary sweeper. In its round designs, iRobot would have to put the cleaning brush in between the wheels of the robot, and the D shaped design allows for a much wider brush and larger cleaning area. The Roomba’s original round design happened as a navigation aid—it’s a lot harder for a round robot to get stuck—so now that the S9+ has corners it will be swinging around, it will need to be smarter about movement.