
New Roomba Has Persistent Maps, Selective Room Cleaning, Automatic Dirt Disposal - sahin-boydas
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/new-roomba-i7-features-persistent-maps-room-cleaning
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suzzer99
This will be a big step up from what I have now where my Roomba immediately
heads to one never-travelled corner of my apartment and does its best to get
stuck there.

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.

~~~
Scoundreller
About 80% of that applies to most housecats.

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.

~~~
bitwize
No wonder cat-on-Roomba videos are so popular. The Roomba's goals are so
aligned with the cat's that the cat goes "Let us join forces, brother."

------
konsnos
The robot vacuums cleaner technology seems to finally be useful enough,
although it still has improvements to make. I've just recently acquired a $400
RoboRock s50. Comparing its features with the $900 Roomba, I can say it's
worth it. The s50 tries to mop the floor albeit just with water. It is very
good with carpets though. I ordered it from China and I was anxious if I would
have to use translation software to understand the manual but thankfully the
s50 has the voice commands, manual and the mobile app translated into English.
The scheduled cleaning is really worth it. Make sure to keep away cables and
curtains that reach the floor. Once, the wind got the curtain around the
cleaner and the sensor detected obstacles everywhere and stopped. The app
notified me that I need to remove obstacles which I did promptly and continued
to clean until it finished. I am not really sure what's stopping Roborock to
make the maps permanent like the Roomba.

~~~
Erwin
The English version of the RoboRock marketing is quite amusing:
[https://www.gearbest.com/robot-
vacuum/pp_954639.html](https://www.gearbest.com/robot-vacuum/pp_954639.html)

> 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.

~~~
Chyzwar
That makes perfect sense. While s50 is cleaning you have time for coffee.

~~~
el_caro
And, I mean, just think about all the spilt beans and grounds. Gonna need a
tornado to clean that up.

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mrfusion
The next big breakthrough would be to put a bulldozer on it and push all the
toys into one corner and clean the rest of the room.

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)

~~~
taeric
Oddly, the Roomba has been great so far getting is to tidy the house. Some
errant cables and poor laundry habits are the only thing that breaks the daily
run of these things.

~~~
kpil
I have an older random walk Roomba and a newer Neato BotVac. The Botvac is
nearly usable, but is also battling and eventually getting stuck on a dustpan
in a corner more often than not.

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.

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brisance
Whatever happened to their plan of sharing home data with 3rd parties?
[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/technology/roomba-
irobot-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/technology/roomba-irobot-data-
privacy.html)

~~~
mcross
See
[https://homesupport.irobot.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/964/~...](https://homesupport.irobot.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/964/~/irobot-
roomba-privacy-and-data-sharing) for clarifications the company posted on data
privacy.

~~~
brisance
Thanks for the effort in sharing this.

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.

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MatthewWilkes
Sounds great, but unless they offer a model with no internet connectivity
it'll be a no from me. I've got an older Roomba that only has 802.15.4 and IR
connectivity, with no cameras. That feels a lot safer.

~~~
mikejb
I had the same concerns, particularly since I bought the 980 with the camera
on it. I ended up creating an access point with my phone to set it up, and now
I have an old beaten phone as controller for it that has the same access point
but no internet. Getting to that point was a pain, and the reason why I'm
currently convinced that this will be my last iRobot.

~~~
394549
My concerns aren't about what the Roomba would do to other devices on my
network, but what kind of data it's sending out and how that data could be
used. That can't be mitigated by just having the thing connect to a separate
network.

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.

~~~
wincy
I believe the grandparent comment said he cut off internet access for it and
the old phone he uses to control it. It sounds like it works on a strictly LAN
connection unhindered.

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.

~~~
Izkata
What type of floor do you have?

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.

------
dandare
The most impressive thing about Roomba is its physical durability. My Roomba
must have traveled many many miles over the past 5 years and it looks battered
like WALL-E. I have replaced all the peripherals over the time but the gear
goes strong and my Roomba still does a great job.

~~~
notyourwork
Curious what you first replaced? I’ve had one for a few years and it seems
like it’s still in good condition but wondering what to look for.

~~~
tyldum
After 8 years I had to replace the whole drive unit. It worked 5 days a week
for those 8 years æ, though. And my toddler used to surf on it...

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romwell
I have to say: I love my Roomba; this device meant I had to use an upright
_once_ in the past three years - when I moved out of my previous apartment.

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.

~~~
Someone1234
Seems like you've invented hypothetical problems to complain about. The
existing Roomba has none of the issues you speculate it has, and as long as
there is a way to force-delete the persistent map it is unlikely the new one
will either.

~~~
romwell
>Seems like you've invented hypothetical problems to complain about. The
existing Roomba has none of the issues you speculate it has

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.

------
harperlee
I'm actually genuinely surprised it did not have persistent maps yet.

\- 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.

~~~
crooked-v
Synchronizing a digital map with a physical device without a lot of expensive
sensors and expensive specialized hardware is extremely hard. For example,
consider that an iPhone X can only _mostly_ keep track of a room's boundaries
with its onboard sensors and camera... and it has a market price of $1000.

~~~
eptcyka
Why does a smartphone have to keep track of a room's boundaries?

~~~
mattdeboard
So the swat team can find you ?

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xchip
Stay away from Neato cleaners, they sell them with a type of battery that only
lasts for 6 months (that is what the guarantee claims), so prepare to spend
$45x2 every year.

~~~
zzleeper
That was the case in my older neato, 5+ years away. But my botvac had
performed flawlessly for the last two years (and the app app works amazingly,
including saving older cleanup maps, sharing the dirt in status, etc)

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imeron
My feature request for any robot vacuum: \- handle thick carpets

~~~
brujoand
The RoboRock s50 cleans the crap out of our carpets. Literally.

~~~
foota
Hah oh man that reminds me of this hilarious story
[https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-
now/2016/08/15/po...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-
now/2016/08/15/pooptastrophe-man-details-night-his-roomba-ran-over-dog-
poop/88667704/)

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moomin
I always think “It’d be nice to have a Roomba”. Then I remember I live in a
three storey house with lots of rugs, a single step in the middle of the
hallway, children who leave toys in the front room and rugs everywhere.

~~~
dandare
3 story house, 2 kids and several rags here - our Roomba changed our lives. It
forces you (and the kids) to clean all toys in the evening, it will clean the
living room every night and then I carry it to other stories as I see fit. I
have also adjusted all our furniture to either sit on the floor or be "roomba
tall" \- and now I can not imagine how people live with that dust under a sofa
or a wardrobe :)

~~~
obitoo
Yes, the toys thing is great - we have the cleaning set at 10am every morning
and you've never seen a kid scramble to tidy up so quickly as when she hears
the robot start up!

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dogan
Been using Neato XV for some time; the way it navigate the rooms is a lot
better than my previous Roomba. But apparently Roomba caught up navigation-
wise. Dirt disposal definitely looks interesting as cleaning is an issue if
you have pets at home.

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marcrosoft
Roombas came out in the early 2000s and still can't vacume a floor half as
good in 2 hours as a human can in 10 minutes. If the floor has carpet it
doesn't even begin to do 10% of the job.

~~~
pravda
I love my Roombas. A better job then manual sweeping and they get under the
bed.

Can't say how they work on carpet, but for wood flooring, they are most
excellent!

~~~
woolvalley
I had a roomba, but the combination of constant brush maintenance, hair
cutting and emptying made it a pain in the ass. Not to mention how it totally
ate wires on the floor. The time it saved was taken up by different things.
And it did a relatively bad job compared to a human

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.

~~~
aedron
They make sense within a pretty narrow use case: You have a largish room with
hard floor, which is usually kept uncluttered. You don't have pets.

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.

~~~
schiffern
>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

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jobigoud
Weekend project: reuse the persistent map data for VR by creating a virtual
environment containing in-world obstacles at the same place as physical
obstacles.

~~~
kodablah
Tangentially related idea[0]: A programmable robovac simulation environment.
Can be gamified or an actual research environment, think "Kerbal Vacuum
Program".

0 - [https://github.com/cretz/software-
ideas/issues/89](https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/89)

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nradov
I'll bet it still can't avoid getting caught on rug tassels, or wedged under
furniture that's exactly the wrong height, or have long hair completely bind
up the roller.

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JustFinishedBSG
Nice, can't wait to buy the cheaper Xiaomi clone in 6 months.

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needle0
The Roomba high-end model names sounded like a graphics card with those "980"
naming conventions, and now it decides to sound like a CPU instead?

~~~
aedron
And a high end graphics card sounds like a Roomba too, so it makes sense!

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apazgo
Someone know how the magnetic stripes work? I bought some random ones and they
don't work.

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msaharia
How are the Xiaomi clones compared to Roombas? Any recommendations?

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true_tuna
But does it have pile of shit avoidance?

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shironineja
I see we are still a ways off from Westworld but we'll get there.

~~~
smaili
Based on how the show's been progressing, I'd be quite worried if/when we do
get there :)

------
tibbon
None of these work well in houses and apartments in New England, that often
have 3cm high door thresholds. Sigh.

~~~
graeme
I made some little ramps from a piece of wood I bought at a hardware store.
They were curved pieces designed for an oak table or something. One side low
to the ground, one side 3cm high.

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.

