Having hacked on Roombas[0], one thing which dissatisfies me is open hardware access. That is, let advanced users SSH into the robots and let them read the sensor data and control the robot. Once you have that you could repurpose the robot for your own needs, which for me in [0] was basic object detection (trying to find something resembling human legs in this case). This could be used for either counting people in the room or to give spatial data information for other use-cases. As demonstrated in my later YouTube video[1] the floorplans created with the vacuum cleaner laser can be used to position IoT devices for your own augmented reality stuff, that is, for real-time position tracking in relation to the room in which the robot is standing in, or just simply calibrating a gyroscope of another device which then uses the pre-made floorplans.

Anyhow, one thing which I have been thinking is that given a smart home, do people rather want to talk to an abstract thing like an Alexa, or will they want to have a physical thing to which they talk to, like the vacuum cleaner. I imagine the interaction is a bit different regarding whether you just command Alexa to turn things off, rather than have a vacuum cleaner, which you can call to come to you, and still respond similarly to Alexa. With kids, I guess they'd essentially prefer vacuum cleaners, albeit I haven't really tested their reaction because the toddlers I know do not speak English for which the speech recognition stuff is mature. My peers do not expect my vacuum cleaner to either talk or listen, which it can do both, so it seems like it should also roam the room around (without cleaning objective) for others to interact with it. Given the time and artistic freedom, I'd probably buy plenty of vacuum cleaners and have them scan the campus corridors for stationary people to talk to, to essentially just see what people talk back to the robots.

Sorry if the text is incomprehensible, it is quite late.

[0]: https://youtu.be/mlAEZZ5fPbo [1]: https://youtu.be/OTlOULeNUUo