I was an early adopter of the Roomba back in the early 2000s. It sucked, and not in the way it was supposed to suck: up dirt.
The first Roomba barely picked up anything. It bumped into everything else. It couldn't find its charging station. It was deafeningly loud.
Cleaning its undercarriage took more time than it would have taken to just run a vacuum around the house myself. I stopped using it pretty quickly and haven't bought another robot vacuum since, but for some reason robotic dirt-collection technology has continued on without me.
Instead of just weird chunky plastic discs that patrol your house while sweeping up filth, the future of robotic vacuums now includes limbs.
Brought to my attention by The Verge, several companies are busy grafting mechanical arms onto their robot vacuums. Robocks' Saros Z70 model has a «foldable five-axis mechanical arm» to «move obstacles out of the way.» I'm a bit dubious of what it claims to be able to do, mostly because the trailer (you can see it below) is entirely CG, including a computer generated cat the robot encounters.