iRobot partners with Google to improve smart home devices with indoor maps

#News(IoTStack) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

Robot vacuums’ floor maps might one day be used for more than navigating furniture and forgotten piles of laundry, if Google and iRobot have their way. Today, the two firms announced a strategic partnership to improve smart home devices using spatial data collected by iRobot’s robot vacuum cleaners.

“iRobot is delivering products that help people keep a cleaner and smarter home,” said iRobot chair and CEO Colin Angle. “Robots with mapping and spatial awareness capabilities will play an important role in allowing other smart devices in the home to more seamlessly work together. We’re looking forward to working with Google to explore new ways to enable a more thoughtful home.” iRobot’s newer Roomba vacuums — including the i7+, which launched this fall — can create indoor maps of rooms within domiciles and effectively “remember” where they’ve been. Thanks to a combination of the company’s iAdapt 3.0 Navigation tech, a top-mounted camera, and visual simultaneous localization and mapping (VSLAM), they’re able to navigate to destinations using their surroundings to orient themselves, all while autonomously segmenting out rooms before sweeping.

Executives from Google and iRobot told the Verge that the indoor maps could be used to locate products in a room, or to assign names and locations to devices and appliances automatically. iRobot previously hinted that in the future it plans to allow users to share floor plans with other connected devices.

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