Revisiting the Original Roomba and Its Simple Architecture

It's a vacuum + mop combo which imo is way better for hard floors

As a bonus, there are open source drop in replacements for the mfg's cloud service so you can self host your floor maps and stats, if that's your jam. (this isn't roborock exclusive though).

Robots without cameras have an extremely difficult time distinguishing obstacles like cables etc on the ground.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...

It’s incredibly difficult in a successful business to change direction or even innovate.

There’s a bunch of guys in the engine room throwing coal into the furnace.

There might be one or two lookouts shouting - but they are drowned out by the noise of the engines.

If you’re lucky there’s a guy in the wheelhouse desperately spinning the wheel - but the connection between the wheel and the rudder is broken.

You should look at a teardown of one of those sensors. It's a 1D lidar (if you can even call it that, until recently all of those were not ToF but more triangulation/reflection angle) being spun, no high res scans of anything can be achieved using that tech :)

I wonder if they fell into a sunk cost fallacy with their camera-based approach.

I have also recently set-up the LIDAR-equipped 705 for my parents and let me tell you, there is no comparison.

The navigation speed is greatly improved which means cleaning tasks take a lot less time. Furthermore, it works in complete darkness with no problems! The camera-equipped model just bumps into stuff randomly and then gives up when it's too dark.

Back in the day (about 2002) I was working at an education software company which was trying to get itself acquired by Microsoft. MSFT came in and told us our software didn't conform to all these "standards" in the educational software space (which, coincidentally, Microsoft themselves had written). The standards did absolutely nothing to help our customers, and were pure bureaucracy and very very complicated to implement.

I'd recently read Charles Ferguson's book about how his company was acquired by MSFT, and recognized this part of their standard operating procedure, along with extreme and invasive due diligence where they spend a lot of time working out if you're stupid/pliable enough to jump through these hoops while buying MSFT time to work out if they can clone your product. I tried to warn management (yes, really - even bought them copies of the book) but naturally no one would listen, and reading a book was too much like hard work. At some point MSFT simply ceased returning calls, and rolled out a similar product a while later.

The company imploded not long after, not for this reason in particular, but it was part of a pattern of general incompetence and mismanagement.

thanks for the resources !. I've been trying to get a wide view by looking at different algorithms, but I was curious what was actually used in production systems especially for consumer products.

RTABMAP and Cartographer came up in my searches, will definitely give these a closer look to understand how they work.

Right now im starting off with filter based approaches like Particle filter and Kalman filter, but i'd also like to understand how the graph based approaches work.