Skip to Content
Artificial intelligence

This Robotic Vacuum’s Maps of Your House Are the Coolest Thing Since the Roomba

August 31, 2017

Okay, so the video's a little silly—but the tech is impressive. The home robotics company Neato makes vacuums that do much the same thing as their better-known counterparts, iRobot's Roombas. But today the company announced a new feature that may give it an edge: Neato's newest vacuum, the D7, will build maps of its surroundings that users can then interact with.

It may not sound all that mind-blowing, but consider that less than two years ago the state of the art was a Roomba that built an ephemeral map that vanished as soon as a cleaning session was complete (see "The Roomba Now Sees and Maps a Home").

The maps created by D7's lasers, on the other hand, will stick around and be stored on Neato's servers (but won't be shared beyond that). Users will be able to access them and tell their robot to avoid sections of the house, if they like. And that's just the beginning. In an interview with Neato's CEO, Giacomo Marini, IEEE Spectrum learned that users will soon be able to do things like designate certain rooms for more frequent cleaning than others. And with a little machine learning, the robot may one day be able to figure out on its own which rooms or parts of rooms get dirtier, and adjust its cleaning schedule accordingly.

Deep Dive

Artificial intelligence

Geoffrey Hinton tells us why he’s now scared of the tech he helped build

“I have suddenly switched my views on whether these things are going to be more intelligent than us.”

ChatGPT is going to change education, not destroy it

The narrative around cheating students doesn’t tell the whole story. Meet the teachers who think generative AI could actually make learning better.

Deep learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton has quit Google

Hinton will be speaking at EmTech Digital on Wednesday.

We are hurtling toward a glitchy, spammy, scammy, AI-powered internet

Large language models are full of security vulnerabilities, yet they’re being embedded into tech products on a vast scale.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.