Disassembling a Roomba 560

This page is dedicated to the disassembling of a Roomba 560 vacuuming robot. Its purpose is to provide AIRLab users (or anyone else) wanting to hack a Roomba with a guide to the process, so that they can plan their work easily. Other Roomba 500-series models should be similar to the one featured in this page.

Please note that the robot we have taken apart was well-used, so you will see a fair bit of dust and dirt on the parts... all for the sake of realism (just joking... simply, that was a broken robot we could spare in case the process proved to be fatal :-) ).

If you click on any of the images below, you will be taken to its own AIRWiki page, where you will be able to look at it without scaling and download the file. However, even that image will NOT be high-resolution: low-resolution (480x320 pixels). You can download high-resolution versions of them (and some other) from here.

Before dissection

Here you can see the Roomba 560 before any disassembling occurred.

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  Top view. It shows the control panel and little more (although on the top you can see the omnidirectional sensor and the bumper, there's not much to note).

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  Bottom view. This is more interesting, as you can see (almost) all the moving parts, i.e., the two actuated wheels (bigger), the idler wheel (on top), the two rotating brushes, and the side brush used to catch dirt from corners. The "almost" is due to the fact that there are also a small fan in the dust compartment (the only real vacuuming action occurs there) and a motor that lifts the whole brush module when the robot is on a carpet.