this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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[–] [email protected] 109 points 1 month ago (13 children)

Am I the only one confused by why a vacume needs a live video feed? Who's sitting there thinking "I want to watch what my vacume sees!"

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Ok so I used to work for iRobot, the OG robot vacuum maker. Robot vacuums used to vacuum randomly. To make them vacuum systematically, they need to map your house. One cheap way to do that is to use a camera roughly pointing at your ceiling and do Video SLAM. The camera identifies features on your ceiling and how they are changing to know where the robot is and map the room.

I guess ecovac thought they could add a camera feed feature for free since they already had a camera on the robot.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Huh, I thought they were “dog poop sensors”

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

It's both, I have the Roomba with the camera on the front and it can sometimes avoid dog poop and wires on purpose (and sometimes navigate, but it mostly seems like it navigates like the other models with no cameras by bumping into things that don't ever move)

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