If you thought your Roomba's only job was to clean your floors, iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT) wants you to think again. On Wednesday, the company announced it will soon add indoor Wi-Fi mapping to the repertoire of its popular robot vacuum line. More specifically, later this month, the home-robotics specialist will begin rolling out the feature on its HOME app, allowing Wi-Fi-enabled Roombas to build maps displaying the strength of the wireless signal throughout your home.
IMAGE SOURCE: IROBOT.
Unifying the smart home
To be clear, this isn't a massive leap from the cleaning maps already being created by millions of Roombas using iRobot's patented V-SLAM (visual simultaneous localization and mapping) technology. iRobot first introduced V-SLAM, which is enabled by a combination of low-cost cameras and high-tech mapping and navigation algorithms, in its vacuums with the high-end Roomba 980 in late 2015.
But extending the functionality to include Wi-Fi signal-strength maps will help users identify the more pesky low-signal areas in their homes where they might need to place a range extender -- and not just to improve the utility of their Roombas. iRobot's ambitions are much, much broader than that. In an interview last month with MIT Technology Review, iRobot co-founder and CEO Colin Angle argued that, while the spatial understanding that Roomba has is central to its ability to clean floors, it can also provide a "unifying intelligence [that ties everything together]" and serve as the "building blocks of the smart home."
"So if you bought a Roomba, own a smartphone, and have some number of connected devices, the Roomba could build a map of your home, place your devices within the map, and share that information with other devices," Angle explained. "Then the ecosystem could give you a choice of preferences based on [the included devices], and have the room start behaving [intelligently]."
In the same interview, Angle offered a reminder that iRobot's other areas of interest include lawn mowing, laundry folding, loading and emptying dishwashers, and bathroom cleaning. "Robots will eventually handle all of this routine home maintenance; it's just a question of when," he added.
However, in order to function as pieces of a cohesive smart home, these robots need to be able to communicate with both one another and smart devices from different manufacturers. And that starts with Roomba -- a robot that travels throughout your home -- as the unifying piece.
Baby steps
It won't happen immediately, of course. Though iRobot has already made Wi-Fi mapping available to a limited number of users, it won't be automatically available for every Roomba owner right away. Instead, iRobot will give users the option of signing up for a beta program within its app. Through that program, iRobot will initially launch Wi-Fi mapping, then follow with additional beta features down the road.