IoT: Is your Roomba mapping your house?
According to The New York Times, Roomba maker iRobot plans to share digital maps of your home. (Under your consent)
High-end models of Roomba, iRobot’s robotic vacuum, collect data as they clean, identifying the locations of your walls and furniture. This helps them avoid crashing into your couch, but it also creates a map of your home that iRobot could share with Amazon, Apple or Google, data with customers’ consent.
The CEO of iRobot, Colin Angle, tells Reuters that the “smart” home lighting, thermostats and security cameras currently on the market are all still pretty dumb when it comes to knowing what your home layout is. “There’s an entire ecosystem of things and services that the smart home can deliver once you have a rich map of the home that the user has allowed to be shared,” Angle told Reuters.
He also said that his company is working to sell the data in the next few years. Amazon’s Alexa can already control some Wi-Fi enabled models of the floor-cleaning robots; it makes sense that the company is looking for new ways to stay connected. We can only guess what a company like Apple could do with the data; asking Siri where in the house you left your Macbook isn’t too far-fetched.
