Robot vacuums may soon clean floors better than humans
The new Ecovacs Robotics model features a larger water dispenser for its floor-mopping component.
Ecovacs Robotics management team members Janice Lerit (left), Raman Chari and Shirley Xue meet at their San Francisco office.
Ecovacs Robotics product manager Raman Chari shows off robot vacuums doing their thing at the company’s office in San Francisco.
Photo: Courtesy Neato
The Botvac D7 Connected, a recent edition to Neato’s Robotics’ Botvac line, has a round disc on top that houses lidar, a laser version of radar that it uses to navigate.
Ecovacs Robotics’ app displays the pro grammed route a robot vacuum uses in cleaning floors.
Self-driving cars of the near future will rely on lidar, computerized mapping and anti-collision sensors. But those same technologies are already available inside homes today — along with dirt detection and advanced suction.
Robot vacuums, first introduced as a consumer product more than a decade ago, are rapidly advancing to the point they might soon clean floors better than any human.
“They’ve got awareness of their surroundings, they have intelligence and algorithms running inside,” said Christopher Caen, marketing manager for San Francisco’s Ecovacs Robotics, which introduced a combined vacuum-floor mopper this summer equipped with lidar, which is the laser version of radar.
“They are actually little autonomous cars,” he said.
The Roomba was not the first robot vacuum, but iRobot has long led the field in what has become a $1 billion market by selling more than 20 million units over the years, said Dan Kara of ABI Research.
Sales of robotic vacuums should exceed $4.5 billion in 2025, said Kara, research director for ABI’s robotics and intelligent systems practice. That’s one reason the biggest names in vacuums and home consumer electronics — Dyson, Hoover, Samsung, Sharp and LG — and dozens of smaller, little-known companies are bumping into each other in the home robot vacuum market.
Manufacturers are adding more features, such as integration with voice-activated speakers like Amazon’s Echo. The vacuums can map your floor plan to create more efficient cleaning routes, remember areas where more dirt accumulates and know when to switch from vacuuming rugs to mopping floors. Mobile apps let owners remotely track their vacuum’s progress.
“Now, they have to keep looking for the next thing,” Kara said.
Adding more technology hasn’t been without controversy. Cybersecurity researchers for Check Point Software Technologies recently discovered a way for someone to remotely tap into the navigational video camera of an LG Hom-Bot vacuum cleaner and spy inside a home; LG says it has fixed the problem.
Colin Angle, CEO of iRobot, told Reuters in July that his company hopes to work with Amazon, Google and/or Apple — all of which have built digital voice assistants — to share (for free and with customers’ permission) the maps it develops. The Roomba can already work with Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant.
The cost of a robot vacuum can be a deterrent. Although cheap knockoffs are available for as low as $125, high-end models can cost $1,000, Kara said. By comparison, a new old-fashioned but reliable hand-pushed model can go for $150, he said.
Some consolidation is happening in the industry. Neato Robotics, for example, agreed in September to be bought by the Vorwerk Group, a German home-appliance maker, although the company will remain in Newark.
Still, technology has advanced far from the first generation of robot vacuums, which had sensors that knew to keep going until they hit an object.
“They’d bonk into something and turn slightly, then bonk into something else and go straight,” said Caen, the son of renowned Chronicle columnist Herb Caen.
But they were also known to get stuck in corners and run out of power in the middle of a room. Eventually, they became equipped with optical sensors that kept them from from falling down stairs and for telling the difference between carpet and hardwood.
“With software now guiding the next generation of devices,” Caen said, “these are robots that instead of just randomly wandering around, they try to mimic how you and I would vacuum.”
Kara said the next wave of “incremental” innovation included adding remote controls, programmable scheduling and ultraviolet light sterilization. Over the years, manufacturers included features like anti-collision and positioning sensors and intelligent navigation and mapping technologies.
Neato added laser navigation in 2010 and basically uses a miniature version of the guidance system atop Google’s self-driving cars, CEO Giacamo Marini said in an interview. Like Ecovac Robotic’s top $549 Deebot model, Neato’s Botvac line has a round disc on top that houses the lidar.
While some competitors use optical cameras to navigate, “we’re staying with laser as a fundamental mapping technology because laser allows you to get precise maps,” Marini said. “In most cases with cameras, you’re not getting precise measurements.”
Ecovacs doesn’t use optical cameras now, but in the future could tie one into image processing, said Raman Chari, a product marketing manager.
“So when it finds a toy, it knows it’s a toy,” Chari said. “But that’s going to be a few years away. Accuracy is pretty important and you don’t want to misrepresent something.”
Despite all the advances in technology, Kara said robot vacuum makers started to make a huge jump two years ago by adding two more basic features that made a difference in cleaning a house: more powerful suction and more complete coverage of floors.
Vacuum makers have also added Wi-Fi, which potentially connects the machines to cloud-based artificial intelligence technologies that would allow them to recognize objects to avoid.
The next step is tying robot vacuums into the growing network of Internet-connected home devices, like thermostats and TVs. Neato’s Marini said the vacuums could learn to stop when the smart TV turns on, or to pause a programmed cleaning schedule if the smart thermostat senses the residents are on vacation.
And because the device moves around, it could serve as a robotic sentry of sorts, equipped with temperature sensing to determine if one room is colder than another.
The vacuums “spend 10 percent of their time being a vacuum cleaner, and 90 percent of their time sitting in the dark doing nothing,” Caen said. “What’s going to be interesting over the next two years is to watch out for what happens to that other 90 percent.”