AINEWS
iRobot invented the robot vacuum. In 2025, Chinese brands took 54% of global cleaning robot shipments, and the same Chinese hardware playbook is now moving into pool and lawn robots.
At IFA Berlin last week, an in-hall swimming pool held a single demo unit: Roborock's RockAqua P1 pool-cleaning robot, cruising figure-eights across the surface while attendees leaned over the rail. On the same stand, a LiDAR-equipped lawn mower, the RockNeo Q2, sat beside a row of the company's robot vacuums. Two years ago neither product existed in Roborock's catalog. Both point to the same expansion: a Chinese hardware playbook that has already swallowed the indoor floor and is now moving outdoors.
The stakes sit a few thousand kilometers west. In December 2025, iRobot, the Massachusetts company that put the first Roomba on a living-room carpet in 2002, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. On January 23, 2026, the company completed a court-supervised sale to Picea, a Shenzhen-based contract manufacturer. The buyer was not a U.S. rival, not a Korean chaebol, and not a European appliance brand. It was a Chinese ODM, an original design manufacturer, the B2B factory that builds products other companies put their name on.
That transaction closes the book on an American category. According to IDC's 2025 global home cleaning robot data, transmitted in summary by industry outlet Leiphone, the top five vendors in the world are now all Chinese, together holding more than 54% of 32.72 million units shipped last year. Roborock led at 17.7% (5.8 million units), followed by Ecovacs (14.3%, 4.7 million), Dreame (10.5%, 3.4 million), Xiaomi (6.7%), and Narwal (5.3%). The total market grew 20.1% year over year. Roborock separately claimed the global No. 1 spot in both volume and revenue for the first half of 2026, a vendor figure that has not been independently audited.
The cleaning robot is not the first Chinese hardware category to flip. Leiphone, the Shenzhen-based tech outlet, organizes the run as a three-stage globalization: OEM contract manufacturing in Yiwu and Dongguan in the 1990s and 2000s, cross-border trading in the 2013 era when sellers like Patuoxun and Anker used Amazon's marketplace to move unbranded inventory, and a brand-building stage after 2021 in which companies like Anker, DJI, Roborock, and Shein put their own logos on products the earlier two stages had taught them to make.
The cleaning robot is the cleanest case of stage three. Ecovacs launched its own brand in 2006. Dreame, founded in 2017, took the high-speed path: aggressive channel stocking and heavy marketing spend to capture shelf space and mindshare. Roborock took a third route. It entered the category in 2016 with a LDS-LiDAR vacuum priced at 1,699 yuan, about $250 at the time, bringing a laser-mapping sensor, the same kind used in autonomous cars, down to a mass-market price. A year later it shipped the world's first LDS-equipped vacuum-mop hybrid.
Each path converged on the same destination: a Chinese-owned brand on a foreign retailer's shelf. Roborock, the Beijing-based robot vacuum maker, runs direct-to-consumer online stores and mainstream European retail in parallel, with self-operated channels above 65% of its European sales, per the company's own claim. Leiphone's reporting notes that Dreame's volume growth has come with a margin trade-off: high marketing and stocking spend that compresses the room to compete on price. Ecovacs is still working through the slower transition of a 27-year-old manufacturer learning to behave like a consumer brand.
The IFA floor was where the playbook showed its next move. The Roborock stand put a pool robot and a lawn robot next to vacuums that the company has been shipping for nearly a decade. Pool cleaning and lawn mowing are individually smaller categories than indoor floor care, but they share three things with the category China just won: an aging American or European incumbent, a fragmented dealer network, and a willingness among consumers to pay a premium for a device that does the job autonomously.
If the playbook holds, expect a 2027 trade-show floor where the same five Chinese names account for the majority of outdoor cleaning robots too. The watch items are whether Roborock can carry the technical reputation it built on indoor floors onto a swimming pool tile and a wet lawn, and whether the iRobot brand, now under Shenzhen ownership, becomes the contract manufacturer's path into the U.S. market through a familiar name on the box.
The Guardian's coverage of the Picea deal noted that iRobot had been losing share to Chinese rivals for years before tariffs and a failed Amazon deal pushed it into court. Vacuum Wars described the bankruptcy as the end of a category defined by one company. The next category to be flipped by the same playbook will probably not be cleaning robots.