I’m talking about the the IRobot vacuum machine.
Does it just randomly choose a direction and then just keep going until it hits a wall?
Or does it have intelligence in it that keeps track of where it has already vacuumed(maintaining it’s state) ?
One thing I read that was interesting was that the same company IRobot built and deployed a variation of the Roomba, the Packbot to Iraq that cleared explosives and helped identify the location of snipers so i am thinking there has to be some form of intelligence built into it.
In: Technology
It’s proprietary, so most answers will involve at least some speculation.
At first, it probably starts off choosing random directions, going until it hits a wall, then turning a certain angle that their engineers determined to be most efficient, and continuing on.
But, the Roomba and products like it keep track of their angle and how far they go to [build maps of your house and the obstacles in it](https://www.gadgetking.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Roomba-House-Maps-For-Sale-590×310.jpg) which it likely uses to build optimized routes to keep your floor clean.
I’m uncertain about Roombas specifically, but it depends heavily on what kind of automated cleaner you are looking at. On the high end, there are machines that will map out and systematically clean your floorspace, while on the low end there are machines that will pick a random direction upon collisions. In the middle, there are machines that use algorithms to try and prevent getting stuck or colliding too much, while optimizing coverage.
It depends on the model of Roomba. The cheaper ones will follow some algorithm to decide where to go, while the higher end ones will build a model of the area it’s cleaning in order to move more efficiently in the future.
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