Robot Vacuum Cleaner

A home robot that autonomously navigates and vacuums or mops floors — the most common consumer robot by far.

A robot vacuum is a wheeled home service robot that plans its own route and vacuums or mops as it goes. The first mass-produced model was Electrolux's Trilobite in 2001, but the one that actually caught on was iRobot's Roomba in 2002, which in its early versions simply bounced off obstacles and turned randomly. Today's mainstream models use lidar or vision to do SLAM (building a map of the space and tracking their own position while moving), plan a coverage path room by room, and use structured light or cameras to detect obstacles; many docking stations can now empty the dustbin and wash the mop automatically. It's the best-selling category of home robot by far, and it's also a common reference point for discussing what it takes to get a robot into people's homes: mapping, obstacle avoidance, and autonomous docking are all mature technologies, but actually tidying up objects remains hard — in recent years some manufacturers have started adding robot arms to vacuums.

ExampleA typical use: the vacuum first circles the home once, building a floor plan with lidar; the user marks off-limits zones in the app; after that, it cleans room by room on its own and returns to dock automatically when done.

Also called

Robovac

Related

Service Robot · Consumer-Grade Robot · Simultaneous Localization and Mapping · Coverage Path Planning · LiDAR · Autonomous Docking and Recharging

Sources

Robotic vacuum cleaner (Wikipedia)
Electrolux Trilobite (Wikipedia)