How a robot vacuum could be the heart (and eyes) of your smart home

Robot vacuum cleaners aren't a new concept, having been around for more than 15 years, but they have become astronomically more competent since the days of catching on rug fringes, running out of battery mid-clean and forgetting where they were.

But the next generation of disc-shaped floor-suckers could bring some of the most important upgrades yet, including being more autonomous than ever and knowing exactly where they are in your home and where you need them to be.

The Roomba i7 remembers how to get around your home.

iRobot's latest Roombas, the i7 and i7+, shown off at a recent event in Tokyo, will be arriving in Australia in the coming months. Their key new feature: persistent mapping of your home.

As the robot travels around slurping up dust, it draws a floor plan and uses a sensor to identify landmarks and objects. Unlike previous models, the i7 remembers this information, meaning it will learn the most efficient paths around your home over time.

If you change the layout of your furniture, it will adapt the existing map rather than having to create a whole new one and if you have a multi-storey house, it simply makes multiple maps, and uses its learned landmarks to determine which floor it's on (you'll still need to carry it up the stairs).

iRobot's chief executive and founder Colin Angle says the i7 class, the company's 10th generation Roomba, is the robot he's always wanted to build; capable of keeping a home's floors clean with virtually no user input needed.

"This robot has 30 times the processing power of its predecessor," he says. "So we're fully into a situation today where we can be running machine learning and visual object recognition technology and very advanced algorithms on the robot, to allow it to continue to execute increasingly complicated code."

iRobot founder and CEO Colin Angle.

'Tell Roomba to clean the kitchen'

The ability to map not only makes the robot quicker and more efficient, but lets it integrate more closely with smart homes. Once it's explored your house a few times, the i7 will present you with a map via its smartphone app, which Angle says tends to be "maybe 80 per cent right".

The robot might assume for example that one room is your kitchen, when actually half is your dining room. But once you've drawn lines on the map and named your rooms, the robot becomes very efficient at getting from its home base to a specific room you request. This eliminates the need to use physical boxes to create "virtual walls", as was necessary with previous generations, because if there's a specific area you want cleaned or avoided during the regularly scheduled vacuuming you can just point it out

And if you spill the cornflakes while getting ready for work, you don't have to wait for the scheduled cleaning time or fire up the app. You can just ask a Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa device to "tell Roomba to clean the kitchen".

The Roomba i7+ and its automatic dirt disposal clean base.Credit: Tim Biggs

This ability to recognise rooms is a bit of a turning point, and Angle says the company's future robots, including vacuums, mops and more, will be able to share information for more efficient and autonomous cleaning. They'll also get smarter over time thanks to monthly updates.

"Now that we have memory ... we can learn. If your robot got stuck, we can figure out where and not do it again. If there are areas that tend to be dirtier than others ... we could spend more time cleaning there," Angle says.

Set and forget

Aside from the processing and imaging tech, the biggest hardware update is a change to the charging base. Previously, when the robot's dust bin was full, a human had to clean it out. But the i7+ silently returns home, where the dust is (not so silently) sucked into a special chamber, then returns to its job.

You do still need to physically take the bag and put it in the garbage, but not often.Credit: Tim Biggs

The base can take 30 times the amount of dust that fits in the robot, so you could potentially go months having your floors vacced every day without having to do anything (besides making sure the floors are relatively clear). When the base is eventually full you just need to lift out the filter bag, which closes automatically, throw it away and insert a new one.

With all the updates taken together you have a machine that roams your house autonomously, mapping the layout and scanning for changes, that you can set and forget for months at a time and that will only get more capable of processing the data it collects as time goes on and it receives updates.

It's not a wild assumption to say this is the kind of data Google, Amazon and other smart home companies would jump at the chance to tap into, especially since iRobot claims Roomba is the No. 1 brand of vacuum in the US and parts of Europe. Angle says those conversations are already happening, but vows that selling user data or giving third parties access without user permission is not something iRobot will do.

"It's part of our architecture that if something is going to go up to the cloud to be stored, the user has the ability to say whether they want that to happen," he says. "That's part of our ground-up commitment to privacy and making sure the owner of the robot stays in full control of everything that's going on."

"If there is an opportunity make your home smarter by sharing some of this information, it would be you the consumer saying 'hey, I'll make this linkage to this other company, to make the light bulbs turn on when I walk here ... or so they know the shape of my living room and where it is."

Part of iRobot's plan for the future is to have its platform be able to direct other smart devices that need to know their way around your home. This isn't limited to other cleaning products or even to letting Google Home know where your rooms and appliances are, but could enable new kinds of semi-autonomous machines.

The example Angle likes to give is a theoretical robot with an arm that's designed to fetch objects from around your house, like a beer from the fridge. The task would be made a lot easier — and could be accomplished by a much simpler robot — if your Roomba gave it information on your kitchen, your fridge and how to get there.

"Have you ever wondered why [current] home robots now don't have arms? It's because if you don't know where anything is, there's no point," he says. "It's like we've opened a new door of possibility on what robots will be able to do for us in the future."

The author travelled to Tokyo as a guest of iRobot.