Mario Munich, Senior Vice President of Technology at iRobot, presents the “Roomba 980: Computer Vision Meets Consumer Robotics” tutorial at the May 2018 Embedded Vision Summit.
In 2015, iRobot launched the Roomba 980, introducing intelligent visual navigation to its successful line of vacuum cleaning robots. The availability of affordable electro-mechanical components, powerful embedded microprocessors and efficient algorithms created the opportunity for a successful deployment of a vision-enabled consumer robot.
In this talk, Munich discusses some of the challenges and the benefits of introducing a vision-based navigating robot, and explores what made the timing right for bringing vision to Roomba. Based on the learnings gathered during development of the Roomba 980, he elaborates on the potential impact of computer vision in the future of robotics applications.