CES 2019: Thank the smart home gods
Robot vacuums are supposed to make our lives easier, but a common problem is that you have to tidy up a bit before you actually use it. Otherwise it’ll pummel things like toys and swallow up wires, pulling things off desks, and just causing chaos in general.
New model: Ecovacs Deebot X1 Omni review
Rated: Ecovacs Deebot T8 review
Ecovacs has come to CES 2019 with a possible solution: The Deebot Ozmo 960. The company has beefed up AIVI, its artificial intelligence and visual recognition technology, so that the Ozmo 960 can recognize the shape of objects.
So your little robot vacuum buddy can recognize if there’s a cable, shoes, toys or whatever else you might have on your floor and make a decision on what it needs to do. Ecovacs tells The Ambient that it doesn’t necessarily have to avoid something either. If it sees a wire, it’ll know that it should avoid that. But if it sees something like an extra thick rug, it’ll still go over it.
AIVI will also let the Ozmo 960 optimize how it cleans your home, tweaking its navigation route so that it can complete cleaning more efficiently – getting it done quicker with less battery power.
Of course, with all this object recognition and learning, there is a privacy risk. Ecovacs says no image data will be recorded and sent back to either Ecovacs or third parties. So you’re not going to get advertisements for charging cables. If you want, you can opt in to give your data to Ecovacs exclusively for the use of tuning AIVI.
Unfortunately, there’s no telling when you can get your hands on this cable-avoiding robot vacuum. Ecovacs didn’t give any indication on either availability or pricing.