iRobot, the maker of the Roomba robot vacuum cleaners, has confirmed that The edge that a software update has caused problems for some users of its i7 and s9 robots and that it is working on another to prevent future problems. The catch? Things may take a while to resolve as iRobot expects the update to be rolled out “in the coming weeks.”
According to users on Reddit and Twitter, the recent 3.12.8 firmware update has caused navigation problems. One user described their robot cleaner as behaving “drunk” after the update: spinning themselves around and bumping into furniture, cleaning in strange patterns, getting stuck in an empty area and unable to reach the harbor. In addition, some other users report that the environmental maps their Roombas created have been wiped out by the update.
The severity of the problems varies from Roombas now taking longer to clean the house to being unable to return to the charging station and thus barely working. And while iRobot has worked with affected customers to roll back the update, some report that they are still having issues. They may have to wait for the new software update to come out for the vacuum cleaners to work properly again.
A Reddit user took a time lapse of their Roomba with the update as it struggled and ended up not getting home to the base station. The video shows the behavior described by many other posters on the Roomba Reddit and on Twitter alsoA poster talked about their support experience saying they had waited two and a half weeks for the software update to roll back on their Roomba and it still hadn’t happened.