What do you think about the Neato? Many robot hobbyists will buy one just to get its scanning range finder and it's in the same price range as a roomba.
Now that would be more interesting. The Roomba is sense-deprived for a robot. It doesn't know where it is, and navigates by bumping into stuff. That's kind of lame. Hobbyists had those in the 1980s. Grey Walters' "turtles" did that in the late 1940s. Computing has made some progress since then.
By now, a hobbyist robot should have at least 2D SLAM, able to map its surroundings and navigate using the map.
