Irobot - Household Service Robots

Technology Summary

        Introduced in September 2002, iRobot Roomba transformed from a simple home cleaning machine with only three buttons to an intelligent robot containing the vSLAM navigation system. Capturing 88% market in North America, 34% market in APAC area, and 76% market in EMEA region^[1]( CanaccordGenuity Growth Conference, p7), Roomba is now featured as a standard go-to robotic vacuum for each household across the world.

Until today, iRobot has brought out seven generations of Roomba robots. All models contain two brushes that can rotate in different directions, allowing Roomba to do the fundamental cleaning tasks as other household cleaning robots do. Furthermore, Roomba makes great use of air by implementing a squeegee vacuum next to the brushes to increase the airflow speed so that Roomba can collect any little tiny dirt without difficulties. Mounted with a large contact-sensing mechanical bumper on the front and an omnidirectional infrared sensor on the top of the machine, the most high-end model of 900 series Roomba also accommodates a visual simultaneous localization and mapping (vSLAM), establishing the position of the Roomba in the household^[2](Pacheco, Ascencio and Mancha, abstract) in order to avoid Roomba stuck under the sofa or damaging any furniture.

        Since series 900 model have a feature of WI-FI connectivity compatible with an app on an iPhone or an Android device, users would receive a report with a detailed cleaning mapping after the Roomba finishes its task, which also enables iRobot unit to upload the private data to the cloud owned by iRobot Corporation. In 2017, iRobot CEO Colin Angel planned to share its mapping data collected by their products for free to one or more of the Big Three (Amazon, Apple and Google) in the next couple of years^[3] (Douglas, p2). With that being said, the issue of cloud data leakage or sharing is being put on the table. Once the data is traded or shared, the users’ homes will become inside out, causing a windfall for marketers. For example, Amazon may know that you do not have a dining table in the dining room, and offer you a bundle of choices in dining tables when you open Amazon website next time.  

Critical Analysis

        There is no doubt that the emergence of the iRobot Roomba is one of revolutions in the intelligent home industry, since it eases people from doing the time-consuming household chores. The product also allows people to better understand which area in their home is dirtiest and need more care. Personally, I bought a Roomba 890 after my traditional vacuum broke down. Compared with the traditional vacuum with a handle bar, I could feel how ease and convenient to use the Roomba. In order to avoid noise made by Roomba, I would turn on the Roomba on my mobile app when I left home for school or work, and receive any updates of full trash bin, low battery and finishing the task. I was also able to know its cleaning routes and the dustiest corner by looking into the Clean Map Reports. The housework of cleaning floor became easy and controllable. Intrigued by the iRobot Roomba, during recent few years, more and more home service robots came to our sights, such as Grillbot to clean the grill automatically, smart locks allowing people to open the door with their mobile devices only, and Lawnbott assisting people to move lawn. According to the forecasts taken by the International Federation of Robotics, the worldwide number of household service robots will rise to 31 million between 2016 to 2019, from the amount of four million in 2015^[4] (IFR Press Releases, chart 1). Thus, the potential market of the household service robot is huge. Furthermore, this also indicates that people’s reliance on such artificial intelligence grows at an exponential rate. People are able to release themselves from completing daily repeating and boring chores, and to assign more time and efforts on more advanced tasks, such as analytical jobs. However, on the other hand, too much reliance on the robots and stopping doing the basic tasks over time will induce the inability of human to finish the simple work. Is such advance in technology, to some extent, a backward of human development?