Google and iRobot are cooperating to improve the domestic technology. The two big companies say that the cooperation’s purpose is the one to make the houses smart and so much more manageable. How is it possible to obtain a smart house? The secret is to use the datas collected by the iRobot devices: the maps of the users’ apartments.
iRobot: what is it?
iRobot is a company which produces hoover robots since the 2002. Every generation of Roomba is better compared with the previous one, but the new model, the Roomba i7+, besides to have sensors that allows it to clean between chairs and to pass by the obstacles, it has some new skills. Especially, the Roomba i7+ remembers the “map” of your home.
The two companies so would like to integrate the houses’ maps obtained by Roomba with the Google Assistant to be able to obtain a smart house. According to iRobot, the maps’ informations of your apartment could even be used to simplify the installation of new smart devices.
All of it creates new ways to automatize the users’ houses.
Roomba i7+
The interaction between Google and iRobot is better explained in the new device Roomba i7+.
Roomba i7+ is the new iRobot product which creates maps using the combination of datas measured with the distance travelled, together with the images got at low resolution by the same instrument. The maps can be used to create personalised cleaning’s plans.
The users that have a device Roomba i7+ and the Google Assistant, can even say vocal commands to the hoover. The user just saying “Ok Google, clean the kitchen”, let the robot Roomba i7+ making it promptly.
It can be even possible to ask to the Roomba i7+ device to clean specific rooms with a simple vocal command.
The map of your smart house
The maps of your apartment could be used even to identify products like the lighting connected to the Wi-Fi, for example, by automatically assigning names and positions to the lights in the bedroom, in the kitchen and so on.
The CEO of iRobot, Colin Angle, said that this cooperation puts the basement for future smart houses. “This idea isn’t finalized to can say ‘OK Google, switch on the kitchen’s lights’, but to make possible that they will switch on for real, the robot Roomba i7 + needs to really know which are the kitchen’s lights”.
Michelle Turner of Google, says that the purpose isn’t the one to create a smart house, but a “thoughful house” which requires less effort to the users and that it suites to their wishes and needs.
Google and iRobot inside our houses
The idea that Google will use the space datas of the users’ houses will be destablising for some of them, especially for who believes that his own home have to be a totally private space inacessible to the others.
By the way it is important to know that Google doesn’t have the access to any of the 3D or spacial informations collected by iRobot. “As well as for the smart lights’ assignment, the Google Assistant finds out which names the people assigned to the areas of their homes, so that it can drive iRobot i7+ in that area. We don’t receive any informations about where are the areas, respectively“, said Google in a declaration.
Turner pointed our furthermore, that every informations shared by iRobot won’t be used in other Google activities. iRobot even said in the past that it wishes to use the collected informations by its devices only to make the smart house a house ever more easy to use.
The maps of the smart houses created by Roomba i7 + are sent to the company’s servers through Wi-Fi, but the low resolution images used for the realization of the maps remain only on the device. This last clarification, makes the product Roomba i7 +, a product suitable to every kind of customer.
The smart houses, are the extreme evolution of our rural concept of house: the house won’t be a space of which we have to take care but a place where we can reach the maximum confort.
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