Amazon’s Roomba deal is about mapping your home
If we are permitted baseless speculation: NO, almost certainly not.<p>Reason #1: Amazon needs robotics people badly. Roomba has a lot of robotics people and expertise. It&#x27;s a natural fit, and an easy way to acquire a bunch of fully functional robotics teams.<p>Reason #2: Vacuum robots are useful things, especially for people with pets, which is probably most Amazon customers. Chinese companies are eating Roomba&#x27;s lunch when it comes to cleaning robots (and Amazon knows it!), so Amazon probably thinks they can compete, win, and yield profit on this investment. They&#x27;ll do it by leveraging their existing warehouse expertise to help the robot clean your house better.<p>Non-Reason #1: They want to sell your home information to the police state. Come on people, your local government already knows the layout of your home, you have to tell them that when you build it!<p>Non-Reason #2: They want to look at products in your home to sell you stuff. Sorry, the embedded systems that are going to be on these things are going to be able to recognize &quot;fridge,&quot; &quot;bed,&quot; &quot;power strip.&quot; Not &quot;Miele SKU #7560, Brand New Condition&quot; or &quot;IKEA Krugsforst Chair, Tattered Underfabric&quot;. They are running mobilenet on 512x512 thumbnails, not efficientdet-v7 on 12 megapixel raw input. There is no GTX3080 on board this thing, and they&#x27;re not gonna stream a high resolution video to AWS. And Lidar cannot tell what color your shoes are, or even that the point cloud <i>is</i> a pair of shoes.<p>Non-Reason #3: They want to know what you own so that they can determine some other information about you. Uh, this thing is going to connect to your router, see a MacBook Pro, and a Sonos speaker connected, and subsequently know your monthly disposable income to the $10&#x27;s. They already know this information -- they don&#x27;t to do a bunch of extremely difficult statistics on the huge amount of data this thing could generate to figure these things out.<p>Reason #0: Amazon sells things. This is a thing they can sell. You&#x27;ll probably buy this thing after they acquire it, make it better, and market it to you.