As it attempts to develop a fully functioning smart home, Amazon will soon be able to map its users’ whole homes.
Amazon will have control over its new Robot OS as part of its $1.7 billion purchase of iRobot, the producer of Roomba vacuum cleaners, giving the corporation access to precise maps of people’s homes, which may be used to acquire even more data about each user.
The operating system already interacts with a front-facing camera on Roomba j7 vacuums to map out a home’s structure and avoid over 80 commonplace things including as shoes, socks, wires, headphones, garments, and even pet residue.
According to CEO Colin Angle, this mapping technology allows it to interpret detailed orders such as “clean in front of the kitchen counter” or “clean around the coffee table.”
By implementing this operating system on other Amazon smart home goods, such as the Ring or the Eero router, Amazon may achieve its objective of building a fully working smart house while restricting which firms’ products can connect to the home.
This implies that the corporation will have access to this information, and everyone who uses an iRobot gadget will be providing it to Amazon. Angle told The Verge in May that the AI-powered operating system will give Roombas and other gadgets a “cloud-based home awareness.”
He added that under the concept, an air purifier from Aeris — a firm iRobot bought last year — would detect humans in the kitchen and switch on in the living room, where its noise would not be heard.
‘The concept is an operating system focused on not only activating the robot’s functions, but doing so in harmony with what’s going on in the house,’ Angle said at the time.
iRobot CEO Colin Angle revealed in May that the business was developing a new operating system that would enable the vacuums to interface with other smart devices.
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iRobot CEO Colin Angle revealed in May that the business was developing a new operating system that would enable the vacuums to interface with other smart devices.
He pointed out that iRobot vacuums now answer to 600 Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri speech requests, and that they can interpret voice orders to clean particular rooms.
‘We can know where equipment is so that if you screwed in a lightbulb, switched on an air purifier, plugged in a toaster, installed a speaker, the position of those items can be quickly known,’ he said of the new AI-powered operating system.
‘The breadth of what we’re doing with iRobot OS is at this higher level of understanding,’ Angle added, saying that the barrier to the next level of AI in robots is context, not better AI.
‘For a decade, we’ve been able to interpret the remark “Go to the kitchen and bring me a drink,” he added. ‘But if I don’t know where the kitchen is or what a drink looks like, it doesn’t really matter whether I comprehend your words.
‘Only via comprehension can the basic promise of robots — reaching out and doing physical duties in the house — become a reality.’
The technology might be beneficial to Amazon, which has led the smart home business in recent years by making goods simple to link to Amazon Alexa.
Furthermore, the operating system might enable the company’s planned Astro roaming home security robot to interact with other gadgets as it moves about the house.
Angle is anticipated to remain at the firm when Amazon acquires it.
‘Over many years, the iRobot team has proven its ability to reinvent how people clean with products that are incredibly practical and inventive — from cleaning when and where customers want while avoiding common obstacles in the home, to automatically emptying the collection bin,’ said Dave Limp, senior vice president of Amazon Devices, in announcing the acquisition last week.
‘Customers like iRobot products, and I’m delighted to collaborate with the iRobot team to create methods to make their lives simpler and more fun.’
iRobot was formed in 1990 and is well known for its Roomba automatic cleaning gadget. It made $1.56 billion in sales last year.
This is Amazon’s fourth largest transaction to date, with its $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods Market in 2017 still ranking first.
Amazon paid $8.45 billion for the film company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and $3.9 billion for the care provider One Medical.
Strio is one of Amazon’s four purchases this year.
AI, GlowRoad, One Medical primary care clinics, and iRobot.
In 2021, the business purchased five more companies: Umbra 3D, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Art19, Wickr, and Veeqo. However, the announcement of Amazon’s purchase of iRobot came only one week after the firm reported a significant loss for the second consecutive quarter.
The company’s sales surpassed $121 billion in the quarter, but it recorded a $2 billion loss as it worked to reduce expenses.
Many of the losses were attributable to the company’s growth during the COVID sales boom. However, the loss was smaller than in the first quarter of this year, when the business reported a $3.8 billion deficit. This was their first loss since 2015, and it was exacerbated by a significant write-down on their electric car startup, Rivian.
Amazon’s shares rose 12% in after-hours trade, then fell more than 1% again on Tuesday, bringing the year-to-date loss to 17.7 percent.