IBM Physicist Demonstrates Why a Roomba Can't Clean His House

iRobot may have impressed us recently with its latest robot vacuum capable of detecting and avoiding dog poop around the home. However, there's a much more common object found on floors that presents a big challenge for the tiny robots.

Dmitry Krotov is a physicist working on neural networks and machine learning at IBM. It makes sense that someone with that day job would choose to rely on an intelligent vacuum to clean his house while he's at work, but the problem is, his Roomba won't carry out the task.

Krotov shared a video via a tweet to demonstrate what is happening:

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Clearly the Roomba has a problem with dark stripes on the surface it's traversing and views them as "cliffs" it doesn't want to fall off. Krotov's suggestion is for iRobot to use a more diverse dataset so its robot vacuums can tell the difference between a black stripe and a sheer drop more easily. Without a software update (or a new robot vacuum), Krotov is going to have a very clean section of rug in on an otherwise increasingly dirty floor.

As The Verge reports, the tweet did trigger a response from Ben Kehoe, Cloud Robotics Research Scientist at iRobot, who pointed out the new Roomba models don't suffer from this problem, "but it took YEARS to figure out how to make the sensor robust to this while remaining cost effective. The constraints on consumer electronics are brutal."

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In a follow-up tweet, Kehoe went into more detail, explaining "The problem, in short: the "cliff sensor" is an LED+photodiode. Does the photodiode detect reflected light from the LED? Great, the floor is there! No reflected light? Uh oh, that must be a cliff. Dark black carpet->no reflected light, it looks like a cliff!"

So clearly it's not something iRobot overlooked, more that it was a problem they couldn't solve on earlier models. It's worth keeping that in mind the next time you see a cheap used Roomba on eBay, especially if you live in a house full of striped rugs.

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