New Roomba Has Persistent Maps, Selective Room Cleaning, Automatic Dirt Disposal
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
It also has an uncanny knack for doing stuff like getting into the bathroom when I'm taking a shower, then banging the door shut behind it and proceeding to thrash around until it dies. Or heading out a just-opened front door and trying hurtle itself off my landing.
I think my Roomba may be trying to off itself.
Getting stuck in unimaginable places.
Unusual desire to frequently visit particular places for unknown reasons.
Going into the bathroom, only while you’re showering.
Banging on the door because you’re behind it.
Heading out just-opened doors, only to quickly return.
I look forward to the version 2.0’s 95% accurate dust disposal system.
I let go of it eventually.
Anyway, an amazing vacuum and absolutely great for the price.
Storing a map also means you need to have a very good way to update it.
This is their answer when I emailed about rotatable map;
"Dear The map takes the environment near the starting point as a reference. If there are some things near the starting point, it will cause the Robot to draw a deformed map. In this case, please move the dock charger to an open area to solve this problem. Please ensure to retain 0.5 m or more in two sides and 1.5 m or more in the front of the dock charger. "
I'm struggling to think of any open space that large within my apartment. 3 m² is about 6.5% of my apartment's total area.
> Super cleaning like a tornado. Nothing is left after a tornado, you can walk on the floor with bare feet
> Easy to climb 2cm of Obstacle. Nothing can stop the robot's steps
> With a strong power, the robot absorbs all the debris, steel beads, soybeans, dust, millet or any other wastes all in a sudden (is that's what typically lying around?)
GearBest suggests that while buying the S50 robot, I should also adds two accessories and save: an Espresso machine and another portable Espresso machine.
Right now I have to spend thirty minutes cleaning before the roomba can even run.
(Consider this Prior art so no one tries to patent such a simple idea)
The Botvac get caught on a lot of random junk and is beeping miserable most days, and would be much better if it backed down and marked the area to be avoided.
Works surprisingly well, you just have to give it a bit of time and let it do its thing in peace.
Like most other "privacy" policies, this was written up by lawyers.
Note that they make no clarifications as to what is defined as "customer's" data, only that "Clean Map Reports" are not shared with 3rd parties. i.e. once the map data is stored on their servers, does it still belong to the customer or to Roomba? Technically if it becomes Roomba's data they are not violating their privacy policy. Additionally, my reading of it suggests the latter, because the policy says they will honor requests to delete it. A better policy would be to automatically delete it after 90 days, for example.
A good argument could be made to use that dataset for improving the product, but IMO the risks of de-anonymizing it and exposing that data far outweigh the benefits.
I'd rather not have a 3rd party have floor-plans of my house and continuously images of every inch of my home. I'd rather all of that data stay local to a device that I own and control.
It does sound like a lot of trouble for a vacuum cleaner, though.
I mean, how clean do people need their floors to be? I vacuum like once every couple weeks and it’s not like I’m getting sick or my floors look gross.
Carpets I've had could go months without noticing anything, but the amount of dust bunnies and random crap of unknown origin that got stuck to my feet shocked me the first place I got with a hardwood floor.
I'm with you though. No way would I EVER get anything like that that connected to the internet. I can't think of any benefits that would remotely come close to justifying that behavior.
Even if it meant insurance would drop to $0, one "leak" and anyone with a bit of resources can get a nice up to date map of your house, when you're around, what lights are on, when their on, etc. It would be much worse than that site that scarfed social media and documented when people were on vacation, left the house or whatever.
Next up: it'll just connect to 4G. I hope that doesn't happen, but it just seems all too likely.
Interesting! The camera functionality still works without an internet connection? I'd always assumed that some of the processing was getting offloaded to the "cloud," since I couldn't see another reasonable need for the wifi connection.
In what way?
(1) has internet connectivity,
(2) has poor security (due to bad design/implementation and/or lack of updates), and
(3) is on your internal network.
It may not be a valuable target itself, but it can serve as a beachhead to launch further attacks on other devices on the same network. Assuming you rely on some firewall-style network security (a notion of inside and outside), which most people do.
Laptops run operating systems written by and supported by software companies. Because software is one of their core competencies, they are more likely to understand vulnerabilities and release updates to patch them in a timely manner. And they are more likely to continue releasing updates for years.
IoT devices (security cameras, etc.) are usually made by companies whose core competency is hardware. They tend to think in terms of making money by selling hardware, and the software may be viewed as overhead and of secondary importance. You are lucky to get any updates at all, and updates tend to cease long before the hardware stops working.
Having to replace a bunch of Roomba peripherals after under 5 years and calling it 'durable' is laughable.
And one of the things that I love about it is that it's simple. It uses a random walk for its cleaning algorithm, which means that it gets its job done on the average if you let it run long enough.
Random walks are easy to understand. I can re-position furniture in my apartment to make it a bit more Roomba-friendly, or I can shift an office chair before a run to make sure Roomba gets under the table when I'm going away for work.
The nice thing about it is that there's nothing that can break in this scheme. It's dead simple. If Roomba doesn't get to a corner, I know exactly why, and what to do about it.
With persistent maps, that aspect is out of the window. If a Roomba doesn't map your apartment right.. good luck figuring out how to deal with it.
KISS, I'll keep repairing my Series 600 until the spares run out.
Current one doesn't feature persistent maps, either.
The new one does, and is app-controlled. 10 years into the future, you will still be able to find spare parts for the now-10-year-old-Roomba, but good luck with the app.
- It is obviously useful to plan cleaning.
- Once calculated, storing them should be cheap.
- Detecting that the stored map is wrong if you manually move the Roomba to another location should be an issue; just ignore the stored map after too many inconsistencies with current reality.
And Roomba only moves in a plane as a result of its (slow) actuators, whereas an iPhone X tries to do hyper-accurate 6dof real time position, from a very quick external source (your hand), for augmented reality. Thus the sensor and computation cost premium. But that does not apply to the Roomba.
Apple's strategy too?
Third parties implement the feature and then you pay $9-$49 for the software. Sometimes you can add $4-$19 for a software update for every OS update.
It's a great ecosystem for developers.
If they manage to solve that case, then the benefit of retaining the map is less compelling. By definition, you can do an adequate job without it. So then it's a question of what you gain in cleaning performance/efficiency vs. the extra complexity and any potential problems it might bring.
A fair amount of machine learning is needed if a Roomba is able to do things like identify 'nuggets' left by pets, 'cat sick', mystery yellow liquids, slugs by patio doors and beheaded shrews. We as humans have no problems identifying such horrors so long as the lights are on, but for a Roomba things are not so easy.
A version of a Roomba needs to positively look for such unsavouries and report back via the app that the house is clear. This is not that far off what the other iRobot robots do - the military ones - so hang in there, one day there will be a Roomba for you.
Can't say how they work on carpet, but for wood flooring, they are most excellent!
A dyson handheld does a better job cleaning under your bed, and you can clean the couches fairly easily with it.
Your $1000 is better spent on a miele canister and a dyson v7.
We use it for a large kitchen and it's okay. Run it before leaving the house and the floor is clean when you get back. Who cares how long it takes or that it is noisy or whatever. It does like 75% as good as a human would and that's good enough most of the time.
But it's true that a part of the time you save is spent on maintenance instead.
There's a quote I always remember while taking 30 seconds to clean the dishwasher:
"The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders." -- Isaac Asimov, 1964
Even calculated at only 10 minutes of time savings, that's 1040 minutes a year at 2x a week; giving me back an entire waking day of time a year (17/hours).
And don't misunderstand this at all, I absolutely love my Dyson.
Ours handles cat toys and random junk fairly well, usually doesn't eat cables and does surprisingly well on our hardwood floors. It also gets the lip under the cabinets that usually requires me to get the hand vac, which is nice.
They're great at keeping pet fur and "everyday dust" at bay, though. It's easier to clean your house when the baseline is already taken care of.
Downside: Haven't met a robot able to detect cat poo/barf yet. Gotta be careful...
> Downside: Haven't met a robot able to detect cat poo/barf yet.
That's why I leave some dirt inside when emptying the container. By pure coincidence last time there was enough of this residue to mix with the cat barf and form a neat, dry, cigar-shaped... thing. I had to clean the brush area and the brushes themselves though.
I bought a couple sets, sawed them to the right length for each frame, and varnished them so they look like the floor. Now the robot can go anywhere.
I didn't have to attach them to the floor or anything, they mostly stay in place.