Roomba Is Mapping Your House to Make IoT Gadgets Smarter

Have a Roomba? Maps of the inside of your home could soon current of air up with tech companies like Apple, Amazon, or Google parent Alphabet.

In a recent interview with Reuters, iRobot co-founder and CEO Colin Bending said his visitor may sell maps of users' homes to third-political party companies working on smart habitation devices. Collected by the company's high-end Roomba models, those maps include data virtually "the dimensions of a room as well equally distances between sofas, tables, lamps, and other home furnishings," according to the report.

The company could achieve a bargain to sell this data in "the next couple of years," Angle tells Reuters. He reportedly thinks iRobot'due south mapping data tin can help smart home devices like lights, thermostats, and security cameras better understand their physical environment.

The news has, of class, raised privacy concerns. In a statement, Angle told PCMag said iRobot is "committed to the absolute privacy of our client-related data, including data collected past our connected products.

"No information is sold to third parties," he said. "No information volition exist shared with third parties without the informed consent of our customers."

Right now, he said, the company is building maps "to enable the Roomba to efficiently and effectively clean your home." The company's top-of-the-line robot vacuum, the $900 Roomba 980, can, for instance, build a map of your dwelling as it cleans, and keep track of its location until it has tidied up an unabridged level.

"In the future, with your permission, this information will enable the smart dwelling and the devices within it to work ameliorate," Angle wrote. "For instance, if you wanted your dwelling to understand which connected lights were in which rooms and so your phonation command device would piece of work better, your Roomba would be able to provide that. But to be clear, this is but if you opt in. It is still unclear what — if any — actual 'partnerships' would be needed to make that happen."

Meanwhile on the robotics front end, the co-inventor of the Roomba vacuum cleaner, Joe Jones, recently unveiled a new product: the Tertill weed-killing robot. The cute lilliputian device is solar powered and waterproof; it lives in your garden, collecting sunlight during the day. Once the battery is fully charged, it starts roaming and hacking away at whatever weeds it passes over.

About Angela Moscaritolo

Angela Moscaritolo

Angela Moscaritolo is PCMag'south expert on fitness and smart home products. Educational activity yoga for nearly 10 years has helped her in evaluating a range of connected health products including fettle trackers, heart rate monitors, rowers, smart scales, stationary bikes, forcefulness training machines, treadmills, and more. Angela besides tests smart dwelling house devices from her ranch in Florida, including air purifiers, kitchen appliances, and robot vacuums, just to name a few.