Neato Robotics

» see neatorobotics.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Neato started in California in 2005, three years after the first Roomba had taught the general public what a robot vacuum was. The founding thesis was navigation. A Roomba of that era bounced around a room semi-randomly until the battery gave out, on the reasonable theory that enough random passes eventually covers a floor.

The answer Neato shipped in 2010 was the XV-11, and what sat under its lid was a laser rangefinder on a spinning turret. It built a map of the room and then drove straight overlapping lines across it, and the whole machine cost $399 at a point when lidar was something you associated with research robots and surveying crews. The shell was a D, flat across the front, so the brush could reach into a corner instead of circling it.

Vorwerk bought the company in 2017. Vorwerk is a family firm in Wuppertal, founded in 1883, whose business is selling Thermomix food processors and Kobold vacuums at the door, and it left Neato to run its own sales operation in the United States. That operation is the one Vorwerk would later say had never paid for itself.

~ the dossier ~

~ the sensor, not the vacuum ~

The interesting object here was never the vacuum. It was the laser distance sensor Neato designed for it, engineered down to a consumer price point and then sold inside a household appliance rather than to a laboratory.

The robotics community noticed immediately. People bought the vacuum to take the turret out of it, and the reverse engineering that followed produced drivers and a published protocol for a part that had never been meant to leave the chassis. Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute ran a talk on the internals under the title "Under the Hood of XV-11". This is the part I have a claim on: I spend my working hours on perception for small aircraft, and cheap spinning lidar is something my field simply has now, in the way you stop noticing the ground you are standing on. A floor cleaner did a good share of the work to get it there.

~ april 2023 ~

The press release went out late in the week before 1 May 2023 and the language was corporate and clear. Neato had brought valuable experience to Vorwerk's own product development. Its independent sales through e-commerce and retail, aimed at the United States, had not been successfully developed, and the company had missed its own economic targets for several years. As part of a consolidation it would close despite restructuring efforts, taking 98 jobs worldwide.

Two commitments came attached. Vorwerk would retain a fourteen-person team in Milan to keep the infrastructure behind Neato's cloud services secure for at least five years, and spare parts and repair service were guaranteed for at least five years as well.

~ five years, then two ~

In October 2025 Neato published a notice saying the cloud services would be taken offline in stages. The stated reason was that cybersecurity requirements and other rules had expanded a great deal since 2023 and the infrastructure could no longer be provided, with an update described as not technically feasible. Warranties were unaffected and the support documents would stay online.

What that means for a machine in somebody's hallway is that it loses the map. The robot can still be started with the button on top, after which it does one undifferentiated pass of the whole house, having forgotten which rooms were which and where the no-go zones were. A 2010 vacuum with no network at all would do the same job, and do it without an announcement. Vorwerk did not answer when heise asked about the promise it had made two and a half years earlier.

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