iRobot OS Revealed To Make Your Roomba Even Smarter
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On Tuesday, iRobot — the company famous for its Roomba series of autonomous home vacuum cleaners and Braava-branded floor moppers — announced the launch of a new operating system called iRobot OS. While the announcement makes iRobot OS sound like a completely new platform for the smart home, the operating system seems to be more of a rebranding of iRobot's existing Genius Home Intelligence AI platform, at least for now.
According to Ars Technica, the rebranded iRobot OS does not have new features beyond what's offered by the Genius Home Intelligence platform. Instead, the rebranding is said to be part of a more significant move in which future Roomba robot vacuum cleaners (and other products) will use iRobot OS as a way to gain a deeper understanding of your home layout and cleaning habits.
Instead of immediately adding untested features, iRobot OS, according to the company, will help current and future iRobot products become smarter over time. The eventual goal seems to be using the operating system to make its products better and more effective when it comes to autonomous cleaning. In simpler words, the update to iRobot OS won't make your existing Roomba vacuum cleaners smarter than they already are.
iRobot OS: What are the existing features?
If you own Roomba's j7 and j7+ robot vacuums, these machines are already running the latest version of iRobot OS. The most important features the company touts about these machines are their pet-centric capabilities. These functions include the Pet Lock feature that prevents pets and kids from accidentally turning the device on and the Keep Out Zones option that lets users specify areas of their homes they don't want the products to clean.
The Keep Out Zone functionality can be especially helpful for people who own pets that are extremely territorial in nature and do not really fancy a strange-looking moving object intruding into their space. For pets that shed a lot, iRobot OS can recommend an automated cleaning schedule that takes the pet shedding season into account.
One of the major concerns surrounding robotic vacuum cleaners is the ability to avoid objects. Having detected more than 43 million objects across users' homes, iRobot OS now claims the ability to detect, recognize, and avoid more than 80 different objects commonly found in homes. This ability is further enhanced by the company's ever-evolving computer vision platform. Apart from these updates, the move to iRobot OS will also help these machines respond to Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant voice commands. iRobot claims existing products can already differentiate between 600 individual voice commands, with more advanced features coming with future updates.