They were really excited to use it. We put beacons all around the house and then activated the Roomba on the hardwood floor near an obvious pile of dust in the middle of the living room. I figured that would be the Hello World test.
After about 10 minutes of watching it randomly bump into walls, get jammed under the couch, we started to get disappointed. But then it made a direct path towards the dust. We all got excited and then watched it simply go right over the dust without picking up anything. At that point I picked up the unit and kept restarting it over and over until it would pick up the dust.
We tried it on maybe two other occasions and it would just continuously get stuck within a few minutes (usually either between piano legs or under furniture that was raised about the same height as the vacuum). They re-gifted it back to me where it sat unused until I finally gave it away for free. That was well over a decade ago and I now realize that I had unrealistic expectations and possibly didn't give it a fair chance.
Have they improved much since then? My home has lots of hardwood floors throughout and I vacuum daily. Even though there's central vac access everywhere I prefer to use a Miele canister vacuum.