iRobot is testing software to make sense of all the rooms in a house | Hacker News Reader

iRobot is testing software to make sense of all the rooms in a house

spectrum.ieee.org

41 pointssohkamyung40 comments

I have a Xiaomi Mi robot vacuum and it is capable of mapping the whole house and showing me on the phone where it is and what was the cleaning trajectory. It's quite smart, it understands room layout, and can handle many rooms without attendance.

Example of house map: https://www.androidcentral.com/sites/androidcentral.com/file...

I only wish I could tap the map and have it go there. I keep having to operate it using the phone controls, and the signal goes to the US and back even though the damn vacuum is right next to me. This leads to > 1 sec response times, which make it impossible to steer.

I agree, pointing to a location, or even selecting a rectangle on the map should work.

Yes, especially given the fact that it already does the exact same thing when you tell it to go back to the dock (ie it finds a way to a spot on the map, its dock).

Some of the Samsung robot vacuums can do this: http://support-us.samsung.com/cyber/popup/iframe/pop_trouble...

And if they pull a Logitech (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/logitech-to-shut-dow...) I guess you'd have at least a tiny spot on the floor which will be very clean.

If you could reverse engineer it I would fake the control server (e.g. have a router that will spoof DNS) and have the spoof server be in your network. I wonder if the server does anything more intelligent than relay the messages from your phone, or if it has SSL...

Hah, man-in-the-middle for a vacuum cleaner. Welcome to the future.

If you don't mind me asking, how does it work? Would you say it vacuums good? I've tried a few Chinese brands and they've all not done much of anything besides move dirt around.

I am more satisfied with it that I initially imagined I would be. It might not get everything - for example, if you have too much dust or lint, in one pass. But it gets 97% and if you put it daily, it's effect is 100%. As a device it is cute and has a nice voice. It tends to "steal" USB cables and slippers, so you need to put those safe before you run it. In fact I was amazed when I realized that for the first time there is a non-living agent in my house that can steal slippers and cables. It's clearly a small step for a robot, but a large leap for me.

Not OP but I own one aswell.. I really like that thing for the price. It Cleans decently in a good amount of time.

I Italien setup is a bit hard because you have to change language from Chinese to English but other than that no complains.

In tests I always see it go either head to header or beat the 700$ more expensive roomba.

Roomba will do this as well.

https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/roomba_cl...

I owned a Roomba for a while. It did an OK job of cleaning the kitchen floor but was noisy, slow and didn't do a good job of corners, or under cabinets that stick out a little, etc.

But worse I had to carry the thing from room to room because, of course, it can't climb stairs nor will it vacuum them. And in any room with wood floors and rugs it got stuck repeatedly.

The most labour intensive part of vacuuming my house is the stairs; Roomba 'solved' the easy part.

You're doing it wrong. You need a house with no carpets, all furniture at a clearance of min 15cm, no stairs, and to make sure there are no USB cables on the floor or thin slippers which might get "stolen" by the bot. Then it can do its magic unattended.

I observed that running the robot daily gets much better results than my best attempt at vacuuming. It's just more attentive to detail and goes methodically without missing a spot.

When I was lately buying furniture I had this in mind. However now I have a crawling baby with lots of toys and now it's not as relevant.

I too am expecting a baby soon and bought the robovac with the intention to run it daily in his room (now I realize that I want it for the whole house, because it's so good). It's true that little toys get stuck in, but that's the same with traditional vacuuming as well - you still need to pick up the toys before vacuumig.

They need to work on hardware that can actually connect to the app. 3 different Android phones and 3 different Braava Jet robots and none would connect to the software. Their support gave up. App rating is almost 3 starts now with tons of reports that it won't connect.

I only mention it because they get such good press, but no one is reporting on all the disappointed customers.

I think I vaguely recall some confusion when I first set up my Roomba 960 with my Android phone, but once I got it going it hasn't had any issues since.

I feel like iRobot needs to work on it's software to justify it's hefty price tag. My roomba just drunkenly roams around the house cleaning up things, but its just a matter of random luck if it gets full coverage in 1 hour, or 3 hours.

Still beats manually vacuuming though

It beats manual, but I agree, it seems so much of the battery use could be better served. I would think there would be a robot where you attach a stick to it and walk it through the path you would take to vacuum the room. Then you can save paths and the robot will just run through each path as saved.

Smarter robots have existed for a long time (e.g. the Neato or the high-end Roomba model).

They create a map of your place and then clean it systematically instead of randomly like the cheaper Roombas.

This is obviously much faster, but also less thorough (lower number of passes over any given spot) and less robust (navigation easily gets confused by sunlight, dirty sensors, room changes, etc.).

> less thorough (lower number of passes over any given spot)

If the device is smart enough, thoroughness can be a choice so the user can opt for multiple systematic passes instead of being required to wait through multiple random uneven passes.

> less robust (navigation easily gets confused by sunlight, dirty sensors, room changes, etc.)

This implies that robot vacuums that are sufficiently intelligent don't exist yet.

>Still beats manually vacuuming though

For me main cost of vacuuming is prep work not the actual task of vaccuming. Picking up cat toy string, feather toys, kids legos, random one of things. The actual act of vacuuming is fairly simple and enjoyable.

So I don't get how roomba is useful. Doesn't your roomba choke on charger wires, toys, hair ect ? I have a neato that I don't use for these reasons.

For me, the Roomba is a forcing function to keep spaces neat enough for it to work. Which is useful.

Roomba comes with this little IR laser that says "hey stupid machine don't go here". I also have some small cardboard cutouts that prevent it going somewhere where it can royally destroy itself. Then it just whirls around and picks up the hair and dust

>hey stupid machine don't go here

Wish I could also tell my kids and pets that :D

Plus, sometimes you have to go around and rescue the bot wherever it got stuck or tangled in something. If you weren't present you might have to go looking under couches to find it and carry it back to charge.

On top of that, you still have to empty the bot's dust bin and spend a good ten minutes removing the roller and cutting out the tangled hair and string from it.

If it could automate more of these steps it would be more compelling.

This is my experience too. My neato gets messed up on longhair stuck in its wheels almost everytime. I have spend a good chunk of time removing stuck hair from its wheels. I am puzzled by people who say "beats manually vacuuming", how?

Not all houses have toys strewn around them, many don't, and those kind of people (single or dual income people with no kids, possibly no pets, little free time) are the prime audience of roombas because for them it works great.

Also upgrades to the 800 series. I have 2 of the 960's and one 800 series, the difference is their intelligence is massive, yet from a hardware perspective they're almost identical [one lacks a camera].

I pretty much want to dump my 800 series and replace it with a 900, but the cost is so insane i cannot justify it.

HN's readers, how do you deal with your connected devices?

Do they use the same network as you? Or have you a dedicated network to them? Or an on-demand dedicated network (connection only when necessary/allowed)?

It might be unpopular on HN, but use the older iRobot generation that is not "smart" aka no WiFi, no spyware, just a "dump" little robot vacuum cleaner. Do you think Mark Zuckerberg, or Elon Musk let such devices roam their home? Nope. Mark wrote his own home assistant, security system ,etc with PHP and unix tools. These devices are for the noobs, the general public, that doesn't care.

dump -> dumb

I have four Wifi networks: One for me/trusted computers, one for untrusted devices without internet access, one with, and one for guests.

My network can access everything else, the untrusted networks can only initiate connections to my home server on the firmware upgrade port (which is used by devices around the house that I've made and which often look for OTA updates on my server), and the guest network can only access the internet.

I would love to hear/see more details on how you set this up. It's something I'd like to do, but I'm not sure where to start (hw, sw, etc).

The wifi? I just got a Tomato-compatible router, there's a section in Tomato where you specify the networks you want. The connections are a few iptables rules, I could write a post at some point.

EDIT: Turns out I don't remember which settings were set by me and which ones the router added by itself. If you have a Tomato router and would like to help me replicate the setup so I can write the post, send me an email (email in profile)!

More details please. This is a glaring security hole in my home that I'd like to address.

I've set up virtual networks in Tomato and multiple Wifi access points, and bound each access point to each network. Then, with iptables rules I've allowed/disallowed connections from/to each. I can write it up if someone helps me reproduce it.

I use Google WiFi with a primary and guest network. Anything which doesn't get security updates goes on the guest network so negligence on the part of Lenovo, Toshiba, etc. doesn't offer an easy jumping-off point to attack the devices with data I care about.

Anybody here have any experience with the Dyson 360 robot vacuum? It's pricy but claims to address some of the limitations of the Roomba regarding range and multi-room coverage.

However the reviews on Amazon are less than stellar.

Very cool. I got a Neato Robotics years ago and it was very good at doing its cleaning room by room, going through each room very methodically. I think it used SLAM.

They just need to add in a shit sensor. Big messes are made when Roomba runs over Fido's "accident" when the owner's not home.

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