• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

The newest Roomba gets smarter as it vacuums

September 9, 2021 by David Barret Leave a Comment

The Roomba is easily among the most ubiquitous robots in the world — but it has never been one of the smartest. On the whole, that’s not a major issue. The top-selling vacuum is good at what it does: cleaning floors. But a roboticist’s work is never done; iRobot has turned the vast majority of its attention and resources on the line for good reason, and the company has spent virtually every generation improving the robot’s ability to perform its very specific task.

This time out, that means using on-board sensors to remember areas of the home and layout, along with areas that need a little extra cleaning time.

“We’ve turned on continuous learning, so that if you’ve changed things in your home, Roomba will figure it out,” CEO Colin Angle tells TechCrunch. “If you open a door that you’ve never opened before, the Roomba will go explore it. If you moved a couch, it will understand that the home is a bit different than it used to be, and that’s okay. The information that we’re gathering grows in richness.”

Image Credits: iRobot

The other big piece of that puzzle is identifying and avoiding specific objects. The company says it has worked on identifying hundreds of potential objects, but is starting with two specific problem areas: cords and poop. Both are big potential problem areas for a robotic vacuum system, albeit for dramatically different reasons. In either case, you don’t want to have to get down on your hands and knees and deal with the fallout.

In the case of the former, iRobot made an acronym — and a guarantee. With Pet Owner Official Promise (P.O.O.P.), the company says it will replace any j7+ that runs over animal dookie. (Fine print: Offer valid for 1 year from purchase and covers replacement product only. Available in limited jurisdictions, additional terms and conditions apply.)

“You can Google this and see some not so pleasant examples of robots running over poop,” says iRobot’s director of Product Management, Hooman Shahidi. “We’ve solved this problem with consumers. If we see animal poop, we avoid it and inform the consumers that we saw it.”

Image Credits: iRobot

Angle adds, “The glorious career of roboticists may not have been fully realized when we were sending people home and creating hundreds of models of poo. Sending people around to photograph and create synthetic models of poo. I don’t know how many tens of thousands of images of all different shapes and sizes of synthetic images were required, but this is not demo code, clearly. We can’t do pee. It has to have some 3D aspects to it, but it is something we believe you can count on for the robot to identify and avoid.”

The third piece is scheduling, with the system adapting to a user’s activities. That could mean cleaning while you’re away (using your phone as a trigger for proximity) or making sure it avoids rooms you’re in. If the robot has to traverse the house, it will drive quietly and not start up until it actually begins its job. The system also now offers a clean-time estimate to let the user know how long the job will take.

The j7 is available now in the U.S. and Canada for $649. The j7+, which includes a more compact cleaning base, will run $849. They’re also available in Europe and will be rolling out to additional markets next year. Genius 3.0, meanwhile, will be available as an OTA update for the rest of the company’s connected robots.

Source Link The newest Roomba gets smarter as it vacuums

David Barret
David Barret

Related posts:

  1. Exclusive-Apple hit with antitrust case in India over in-app payments issues
  2. Get 50B of data for just £12 a month with this unbeatable Smarty SIM only deal
  3. FTC bans spyware maker SpyFone, and orders it to notify hacked victims
  4. The only one way to tackle ransomware: Zero Trust

Filed Under: News

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

  • Humans Started Butchering Elephants 1.78 Million Years Ago In Tanzania
  • Unexpected Discovery Hints We Might Be Inside A Black Hole
  • Why Are People Talking About This “Square Structure” Captured On Mars?
  • The World Has Five Oceans, Not Four – Discover The Latest One
  • Just 80 Percent Of People Can Perceive This Optical Illusion And No One Knows Why
  • Something Other Than Geological Processes Or Humans Created These Caves
  • Can Black Holes Lead To Other Places In The Universe?
  • The Devastating Communication Problem Facing Light-Speed Travel
  • The Great British Pet Massacre: One Of The Saddest Tragedies Of 1939
  • Would A Vacuum-Filled Balloon Float?
  • Queen Ant Produces Babies Of 2 Different Species, For The First Time Ever We Have A Complete Map Of Brain Activity, And Much More This Week
  • Yes, Your Attention Span Might Have Shortened, But That Might Not Be A Terrible Thing
  • This May Be The First Known Portrait Of A Viking – And It’s A Sexually Rampant “Beard Fondler”
  • The Largest Snake In Captivity Is A Humongous 7.7-Meter Reticulated Python Called Medusa
  • Poo Power: How Animal Dung Could Unlock New Antibiotic Treatments
  • Perfectly Preserved Dinosaur Tail Found Inside 99-Million-Year-Old Amber Was Mistaken For A Plant
  • Why Aren’t Full Photos Of The Milky Way Real? A NASA Analyst Explains The Obvious
  • Freaky Ratfish Have Teeth Growing Out Of Their Foreheads, And They Use Them For Love
  • The Largest Turtle Ever Known To Have Lived Was An Absolute Unit
  • “It Literally Leapt Out Of The Rock At Us”: How Violent Storms Led To The Extraordinary Preservation Of Baby Pterosaurs
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version