Tuesday 9 August 2022 05:19 PM Amazon's buyout of Roomba will allow it to get detailed layout plans and power ... trends now
Amazon will soon be able to map user's entire houses as it works to create a fully-functional smart home.
As part of the tech giant's $1.7 billion acquisition of iRobot, the maker of Roomba vacuum cleaners, Amazon will be in control of its new Robot OS — giving the company access to detailed maps of one's homes, which could be used to gather even more data about each user.
The operating system already works in conjunction with a front-facing camera on the Roomba j7 vacuums to map out a home's layout and avoid over 80 common place objects like shoes, socks, cords, headphones, clothes and even pet residue.
As a result of this mapping technology, CEO Colin Angle explained in May, it can understand granular commands like 'clean in front of the kitchen counter' or 'clean around the coffee table.'
And by installing this operating system on other Amazon smart home products like Ring or the Eero router, Amazon can fulfill its goals of creating a fully-functional smart home while limiting which companies products can connect to the home.
Amazon will now be in control of iRobot's new Robot OS operating system under its $1.7 billion acquisition of the company
The acquisition will give the tech giant access to detailed maps of one's homes, which could be used to gather even more data about each user
Speaking to The Verge back in May, Angle said the AI-powered operating system would provide Roombas and other devices with a 'cloud-based home understanding.'
He explained that under the system, an air purifier from Aeris — a company iRobot purchased last year — would recognize that people are in the kitchen and would then turn on in the living room, where it's noise would not disturb anyone.
'The idea is an operating system focused on not just activating the features of the robot, but doing so in harmony with what's going on in the home,' Angle said at the time.
In May, iRobot CEO Colin Angle announced that the company was rolling out a new operating system that would allow the vacuums to communicate with other smart devices
He noted that iRobot's vacuums already respond to 600 Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri voice commands and can understand voice commands to clean specific rooms.
But with the new AI-powered operating system, he said: 'We can know where stuff is so that if you screwed in a lightbulb, you turned on an air purifier, you plugged in a toaster, you installed a speaker, the location of those devices can be immediately understood.
'The scope of what we're doing with iRobot OS is at this higher level of insight,' Angle continued, explaining:
