Amazon wants to map your home, so it bought iRobot

Image: iRobot

iRobot OS, the latest software operating system for its robot vacuums and mops, will provide its household bots with a deeper understanding of your home and your habits. This is a new meaning with the news that Amazon has bought iRobot for over $1 billion.

It seems like Amazon wants iRobot for the maps it creates to give it a deeper understanding of our homes. The vacuum company knows how the floor plans are changed. If you recently turned the guest room into a nursery, it knows where your kitchen is.

This type of data is valuable to a company that wants to sell you more things. I want to see how Amazon can use iRobot's tech to improve its smart home ambitions, but many are concerned with the privacy implications. People want home automation to work better, but they don't want to give up their personal information for convenience.

It is a challenge in the tech world, but in our homes it is more personal. Amazon has a history of sharing data with police departments through its subsidiary Ring, as well as having a thorough knowledge of your floor plan, giving it a complete picture of your daily life.

iRobot has connected vacuums and mops that trundle around homes multiple times a week. More than 43 million objects have been detected by iRobot's front-facing, artificial intelligence-powered camera. Some models have a low-resolution camera that can be used for navigation.

If that is what Amazon wanted, it would have bought iRobot a long time ago. iRobot just reported a 30 percent revenue decline in the face of increasing competition, so it probably picked up the company for a bargain. What's the reason? Knowing your floor plan helps you understand it. Context is king in the smart home that Amazon is making a big play for.

"We really believe in ambient intelligence, an environment where your devices are woven together by artificial intelligence so they can offer far more than any device could do on its own," Marja Koopmans told me in an interview. Multiple data points are needed for Ambient Intelligence. With detailed maps of our homes and the ability to communicate directly with more smart home devices once Matter arrives, Amazon's vision of ambient intelligence in the smart home suddenly becomes a lot more doable.

It was likely that Astro was trying to get that data. The robot has good mapping capabilities that allow it to know everything from where the fridge is to which room you're in. It's clear that Amazon already has the ability to do what iRobot does. Astro isn't getting that info for Amazon anytime soon because it's a thousand dollars and it couldn't vacuum your home

The flying camera in Ring's Always Home cam is able to navigate your home. It costs $250 and has a very clear security focus. It is not currently available to purchase.

Context at scale is what IRobot brings to Amazon. The barrier to the next level of artificial intelligence isn't better. He says it is context. For a decade, we have been able to understand the expression, "Go to the kitchen and get me a beer." I don't understand what a beer looks like, I don't know where the kitchen is, and I don't know where the fridge is. Users can choose not to use the Smart Maps feature, which stores mapping data and shares it between iRobot devices.

With context, the smart home becomes smarter and works better without the homeowner having to program them or prompt them to do so. The example of a connected air purifier was used by Angle. The iRobot OS cloud allowed the air purifiers to know which room it was in. I'm in the kitchen. You can make more noise. There are lots of pollutants here. It wouldn't be the same as its role in a bedroom.

Home security company Ring is one of the four smart home brands owned by Amazon. Many of the elements needed to create an almost sentient smart home can be found in iRobot and Amazon. Amazon has begun to use its Hunches feature.

Consumer trust is one of the biggest obstacles. Amazon needs to do more to prove it is worthy of this type of access. More convenience doesn't feel worth the tradeoff for a lot of people

The photo was taken by Tuohy.