A new iRobot concept called the Roomba Duo might be one of the best ideas for robovacs I’ve seen all year, and I don’t just mean because it looks like a Star Wars droid. Rolled out at IFA 2026, the Roomba Duo is a large, can-shaped bot that can steam-clean floors, with a tiny robot in a cavity up top that it lowers to the ground for areas that require a smaller bot to handle.
This isn’t the robot’s final form, and there’s a real chance it never makes it to market at all. An iRobot product manager I spoke with on the show floor told me, “Roomba Duo is a concept that we put together to see how the market responds to it, and it’s what we think the future of robotic floor cleaning could look like.” He described the “large base unit” as being meant for heavy-duty cleaning to replace stick vacuums or wet/dry vacuums. The company gave it such heft—it’s about two feet tall and weighs about 66 lbs—to get “extra power” and increase its tank size.
In a demo that I watched, iRobot dropped spaghetti on a patch of carpet (it looked like it was covered in oil and herbs, rather than a red sauce). At the demo’s outset, the entire unit drove over the spaghetti, vacuuming it and then following that with steam cleaning. Afterward, all that was left was a bit of a stain that was presumably from the oil.
When that was done, the Roomba Duo lifted its head off, lowered it to the ground, and let loose the robot that was resting in there like a little disc-shaped matryoshka. The product manager said the companion bot is essentially the Roomba Plus 575, a smaller sweeping and mopping robovac that iRobot debuted earlier this year. It did the usual robovac stuff, sweeping under a small platform supported by legs that are close together, showing the benefit of this robot-in-a-robot concept.
It’s very likely that, if it makes it out to the market, the Roomba Duo will look quite a bit different from what I saw today. And in its concept stage, the product manager I spoke with wasn’t willing to guess at how much it might cost. He didn’t disagree with me when I speculated it’ll probably cost more than some of the pricier all-in-one bots I’ve reviewed this year, such as the $1,700 Dreame X60 Max Ultra Complete.
I’m a little skeptical of its steam-cleaning capabilities—will it be able to deal with old stains or more resilient spills like actual oil? But if it can pull off cleaning the sorts of huge messes, like spilled plates of food and such, that you’d never even bother sending a robot vacuum to deal with, it could be worth it.
