[Izkata]

Emptying into the dock instead of having to empty the robot's dustbin weekly and almost everything involving mopping in combined units is within that time range. Lidar mapping was also pretty rare a decade ago, Neato was the first and it took a while before others did it too, then there was apps for controlling no-go zones using those maps instead of variations of virtual walls, if they had anything like that at all.

Roomba was living off of name recognition for most of that period and was far behind in adopting any of it.

[dzhiurgis]

There are ones that integrate into your furniture, a bit like a dishwasher - plumbing included.

Robot arms are obvious next step. Tidying up kids toys would be god sent, but unless speed improves my kids will DDOS it in seconds.

[krackers]

Roborock has a model with robot arms. Quite pricy at the moment though.

[dzhiurgis]

Poor reviews so far. Needs iteration or two to perfect it.

[tguvot]

I got roomba with self emptying dock back in 2018 or so (i think the only one who had it before was ecovacs). same model also came with virtual walls.