One of Google’s greatest successes has been its mapping system, which has led to applications such as Google Maps, Google Street View or Google Earth. With time we have gone from only having images and maps of the main roads and cities of the world to being able to see even inside some locations as we can also enter into buildings open to the public, such as shopping malls, airports, and car parks. And little by little the scale went down, and we can now visit shops, bookstores, cafes, and so on. Google wants to scan and map as much as it could. But there was one place it hadn’t tried to get into until now – your home. But now, however, Google allies with iRobot to map houses.
The company led by Sundar Pichai, Google, has stated along with iRobot, the company that manufactures the famous Roomba vacuum cleaners, to share the data that these devices collect in users’ homes through their sensors and cameras. One of the latest models of this manufacturer, the Rumba i7 Plus, can scan the house by the distance it travels and a low-resolution camera. That allows it to establish cleaning routines for each of the rooms on the house.
Google teams up with iRobot to map houses
With this new partnership, Google will be able to access the planimetry data, that is to say, in 2D, but it is not interested in using the images of the iRobot products’ cameras or the volume generated by the vacuum cleaners. According to the two companies, the reason why Google is interested in these data is to improve the behavior of their devices, such as Google Home.
Through the information obtained by Google from the iRobot’s vacuum cleaners, the company can recommend the best place to put a loudspeaker, automatically set up the smart light systems when we install them and promote future uses that may be generated in the smart homes of the future. However, both Google and iRobot have made it clear that they will not use the data for malicious purposes.
