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Comment by harperlee | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually genuinely surprised it did not have persistent maps yet.

- It is obviously useful to plan cleaning.

- Once calculated, storing them should be cheap.

- Detecting that the stored map is wrong if you manually move the Roomba to another location should be an issue; just ignore the stored map after too many inconsistencies with current reality.

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Following nintendos lead, you only want small improvements in each product version so the user sees a benefit of buying the next version of the same thing they already have. When you are getting close to perfect, you start removing features and add them back in later versions again. (audio out on whatever handheld it was).

> When you are getting close to perfect, you start removing features and add them back in later versions again.

Apple's strategy too?

What feature have they ever added back?

a keyboard.

Apple doesn't add the features back.

Third parties implement the feature and then you pay $9-$49 for the software. Sometimes you can add $4-$19 for a software update for every OS update.

It's a great ecosystem for developers.

I was going to say the AirPod strap, but it looks like those are sold by another company...

Stylus

Synchronizing a digital map with a physical device without a lot of expensive sensors and expensive specialized hardware is extremely hard. For example, consider that an iPhone X can only mostly keep track of a room's boundaries with its onboard sensors and camera... and it has a market price of $1000.

Why does a smartphone have to keep track of a room's boundaries?

So the swat team can find you ?

Xiaomi robot vacuum is a few times cheaper than an average roomba and it had them for years.

I think it’s $1,000 more because it’s a powerful, tiny, general-purpose computer and less because it can keep track of a room’s boundaries. That is to say, the Roomba doesn’t need to do everything a smartphone does and thus wouldn’t need $1,000 or smartphone technology.

These things are not exactly cheap either though, even the ones without any mapping.

well that's not a fair comparison. the iPhone is built to be capable of doing a lot more than a Roomba, thus the cost. Also, much of the specialized expensive equipment is required for the iPhone because of its form factor. For the Roomba, the only new pieces of data one would need is a feed of the current orientation relative to its starting point and rate of travel to mapping out a room's boundaries. The logic is more complex but not to a point where expensive hardware is required.

That is not exactly correct. You don't need expensive sensors to synchronize maps with reality. The coarsest estimate of where walls are can be used to infer a position in a map; it will just not be very precise. But errors of cms should be ok.

And Roomba only moves in a plane as a result of its (slow) actuators, whereas an iPhone X tries to do hyper-accurate 6dof real time position, from a very quick external source (your hand), for augmented reality. Thus the sensor and computation cost premium. But that does not apply to the Roomba.

I think it could make sense if they start with a hard requirement that it must be able to do a good job of cleaning a not-yet-mapped house. (They might feel that is important for making a good first impression or avoiding user confusion.)

If they manage to solve that case, then the benefit of retaining the map is less compelling. By definition, you can do an adequate job without it. So then it's a question of what you gain in cleaning performance/efficiency vs. the extra complexity and any potential problems it might bring.

I am convinced that they could easily do this with the existing 900 line that has WiFi and "advanced vision" technology. They basically threw the hardware in, added some marketing buzzwords, and never really changed the software other than to show a coverage map. The software is the weakest part of roomba. It's navigation system is so naive despite the load of sensors inside. I wish they would unlock the damn thing and just let me script it myself.

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