[breadzephyr]

Looks to me like they want to get in on 3D mapping homes that haven't already been mapped by a Roomba or other similar bot. There is plenty of money to be made selling home layouts to police. At the same time the customer's home is being cleaned, all objects can be scanned to data-mine the customer's shopping preferences.

Maybe training AI and bots is part of what they're trying to accomplish, but I just can't help wonder what else they are trying to do. I am extremely suspicious of any tech companies that make it seem like a great idea to let their tech in my house.

I can't imagine what is going to happen when, if this company ever really develops cleaning bots, their bots misidentify something as a weapon or drug stash and automatically dial the police. Or one of their bots gets remotely hacked by a vengeful person who then triggers the bot to call in a SWAT team.

Also, if this kind of labor is the "unskilled" labor that we've all heard of (or have been told is "unskilled"), AI systems shouldn't need any training for it ;)

[zamadatix]

Yeah, definitely. On one hand it's obvious such companies will want this data precisely to make their systems work. On the other hand... once they have the data, we all know it also ends up wherever someone is willing to pay for it. Even if they say it's not the goal today... 10 years from now how do you know the owner of the data at that point will feel the same way? Doubly so since they don't seem to be making any privacy guarantees around the pricing, just attempts at anonymizing the high level things.

I find it interesting how many people get worked up about the "skilled/unskilled" terminology though. Just walking to arbitrary waypoints is an extraordinary feet in itself - if you dropped me in the past and told me to build something which walks (or even just traverses) as such I would likely not achieve it in my lifetime, despite having great insight into how we've already accomplished this goal. At the same time, people know listing "mastered the ability to walk as a child, proficient in running" in the skills section of their resume does not make sense. It seems easy enough to understand the difference in meaning between the two contexts (skills an average human is expected to have over, say, a rock vs skills which differentiate one as able to start a job without waiting for several years of additional development) rather than seek to pick the least relevant interpretation.

OTOH, there are definitely jobs which get conflated as having a low barrier to entry (for the average person) but actually take many years of training to be able to get a typical job in (and not just for the "high end" version of the job). That's definitely a misclassification, but not for something like cleaning homes where the average person is expected to be able to do it themselves.

[ndsipa_pomu]

> OTOH, there are definitely jobs which get conflated as having a low barrier to entry (for the average person) but actually take many years of training to be able to get a typical job in

Isn't the barrier to entry due to the jobs not allowing for mistakes? Cleaning has a high tolerance for mistakes (e.g. missing bits, leaving streaks on windows etc) and so it's fine for an inexperienced cleaner to learn from their mistakes whilst doing the job. However, people would not be happy for a lawyer or surgeon to be learning from their mistakes whilst working - they are expected to already be competent and mistakes are generally very damaging.

[zamadatix]

Yeah, I'd say a job "does not allow for many mistakes" and "requires skill in the labor" are two ways of saying the same thing. If it's alright to do the job completely wrong most of the time and it still make sense to be hired then the base position in that job does not have a skills requirement.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> Just walking to arbitrary waypoints is an extraordinary feet in itself - if you dropped me in the past and told me to build something which walks (or even just traverses) as such I would likely not achieve it in my lifetime,

Sorry, I'm confused. Are you talking about bipedal robot walking specifically or path planning in general? The latter is a long-solved problem, right? And I'm sure bipedal walking was also basically solved in the 1980's.

[zamadatix]

Yes, it's long accomplished in the modern world - but try building it in the 1880s instead of the 1980s. Same total complexity, but now we consider it complex/extremely skilled because it's well out of grasp of the average person. When we apply walking to our physical selves, we don't consider it at all unique (even though it's still just as insane a problem).

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Ah, OK, when you said "the past" I assumed more modern times, 20th century. But yeah, in the 1880s all those were hard problems with no obvious solutions, yet.

I agree also that we take walking too much for granted. And while bipedal walking is "solved" for robotics today, it doesn't work the same way that bipedal walking works in humans or other animals, people had to find very ... specific solutions that were guided more by the technology already available. For example I always thought Passive Dynamic Walking would have to catch on as a better, more human-like, bipedal walking technology but it never really panned out.

So now we have weird, expensive, forceful, dynamic walking. But at least it works.

[cpgxiii]

> And I'm sure bipedal walking was also basically solved in the 1980's.

It isn't even efficiently solved now, in the general case. Bipedal walking on approximately flat surfaces with minimal geometry constraints is basically solved, but complex terrain and/or constraints on foot placement require slower methods that wouldn't really be considered "solved".

[YeGoblynQueenne]

That's right, environment conditions play a huge role and modulate efficacy to a great degree. And the same applies to pathfinding with osbstacle avoidance otherwise we'd all have our robot maids and self-driving cars already.

But we have the theory down pat, is what I was trying to say. There's a lot of engineering still that remains to do, but e.g. Dijkstra's algorithm... works.

I had a longer comment in place of the one I made above, that tried to caveat this a bit more. I also linked to this survey:

A Comprehensive Survey of Path Planning Algorithms for Autonomous Systems and Mobile Robots: Traditional and Modern Approaches

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259012302...

That's just one review, there's more. The striking thing is that there are so many approaches for robotics path planning. That means a) it's a problem for which many solutions are known but b) there's not one dominant approach. One reason for that is what you point out, that it doesn't always work that well.

And that's just path planning, i.e. figuring out where to walk. Gait is a whole other ball game, figuring out how to get there.

[cpgxiii]

The reality of robotics is that the existence of the theory often means little about practical feasibility. I have myself joked about problems being solved in the '80s, but the joke is really something closer to "all of the interesting problems in planning and control were solved in the' 80s and known to be intractable", because the theoretical complexity is just prohibitive.

The last 40 or so years haven't really moved the needle on theoretical complexity, but we have developed new methods and improved existing methods (and also computers have gotten massively better) such that a much larger subset of the problem space is actually practically solvable. Even still, it is almost trivially easy to go from a practically-solvable problem to a practically-unsolvable one, and much of the confusion that exists in the popular understanding of robot capabilities is the result of the solvable/unsolvable line being so close and subtle.

On the topic of bipedal (and quadrupedal) locomotion, I think you could actually argue that we very much do not understand how to solve the problem, and exhibit #1 is that basically everyone (Boston Dynamics included) is giving up on MPC-based control and adopting RL-based controllers which seem to work better but are much less comprehensible from a theory standpoint.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

I think the move to RL-based controllers is just the latest trend tbh. There's papers to be written, so they will be written. I can't say I have seen a huge improvement in performance and they suffer from really poor generalisation certainly compared to planning and MPC.

I agree with your comment- the planning problem is in PSPACE and while there are techniques like relaxations and width-based search that allow large portions of it to be solved there are areas that remain intractable (although I'm not sure about width-based search; I haven't really tried it). But we have to distinguish between different kinds of task.

Robot navigation is a broad field, but just going from point A to point B is really hard to see as an open problem. You stick a PID controller on a robot and set some waypoints and it will happily roll, float or fly between them. Or, like I say, just do A* or Dijkstra's. Problems begin if there is anything between A and B. If it's a solid, immovable object, then that's OK. If it moves, things start to get tough. If you want a big chunk of metal moving safely in a dynamic environment full of independent agents that also go about their goals... good luck with that. Terrain, weather, visibility etc just add variables to the problem and that's bad, variables are bad, we don't want variables.

So when I said "solved" above I was really talking about "walking between arbitrary waypoints" as per the OP's turn of phrase. I might have played a bit fast and loose with "arbitrary" because obviously if one waypoint is in a tornado and the other in a volcano... But navigating between waypoints is a solved problem. It's what you do while you navigate between waypoints that's the open problem [1].

Bipedal (and quadrupedal) walking is similar but that's more robotics and less planning and so I know less about it. Still, Asimo could almost walk up a flight of stairs on its own in the '80s. Again, if you assume nice, clean, flat laboratory conditions, we know how to get a legged robot to walk. I know, I've played around with NAO and a tiny robot dog from Hiwonder. They can walk around, dance, get up on their own, shake your hand, play with a ball etc. How cute. Then of course there's all the kung-fu fighting, somersaulting, cartwheeling etc robots doing the rounds on social media. But again the problems begin as soon as you want those kinds of system to do something useful in the real world, where they need to physically interact with solid objects and moving obstacles.

So what I'd say to hedge a bit on what I commented above is that basic path planning and bipedal gaits are solved but those turn out to be only part of the problem of robotic autonomy which is itself still wide open [2].

Which is a good thing. We gotta have something to work on.

_______________________

[1] Of course, sometimes all you need to do is go boom at the far waypoint. I think sometimes people forget we have very effective autonomous navigation systems: specifically, self-guided missiles. When it's fine for a system to destroy itself when it reaches its target and causing maximum damage is a bonus, that simplifies a hell of a lot of stuff that can't be taken for granted with, e.g., self-driving cars. But, at the end of the day, a self-guided missile is exactly a system that goes from point A to point B autonomously. Fire and forget, that sort of thing.

[2] And when I say "bipedal gait is solved" I'm no saying I like the solution. I'm still smarting that my Passive Dynamic Walking project didn't get funded.

[matthewmacleod]

There is plenty of money to be made selling home layouts to police

Is there?

[nkrisc]

I can totally imagine the sales pitch to police departments: before you bust down the door of the local journalist who criticized you, look up their home floor plan and review 360 camera footage of each room, so you can get to their laptop before it locks when your surveillance team detects they’ve stepped away to use the bathroom.

[ifh-hn]

Ignoring the OTT scenario premise; if the surveillance team is able to detect movement like that then the surveillance team already knows where the laptop is. Why would you need a floor plan?

[nkrisc]

If you were just using something kind of remote sensing technology to determine where people were in the building, but you didn’t know the layout, you couldn’t be sure. I’ve seen examples of using WiFi or other radio frequencies to spatially locate people through walls, but it doesn’t let you actually see what’s there.

So if you combine their position in the building with separately collected layout information about the building, you can better infer their activity.

[ifh-hn]

Presumably the surveillance team, and all the police about to bust down the door, are at locus in person? They already know the floor plan, occupants present, and there locations. No need to infer anything because they're under surveillance...

[breadzephyr]

on further reflection, probably not. I have to remember how much home data is already publicly available (as others have noted).

[morpheos137]

yeah the parent was a rather dumb comment. police don't buy intelligence on the population en mass. how could they afford it snd how could they use it without probable cause? if you are already a target of an investigation they can get a warrant for free with due process.

[zzzeek]

one paragraph in the three mile long TOS the homeowner clicks OK on and problem solved ?

[morpheos137]

yeah i was replying to the comment that selling intelligence on private citizens to police would be a revenue driver. not that it couldn't be done, just that it would not make significant money. the median critical thinking level on HN has imploded over the past year.

[newaccountman2]

rofl

I assume you are being tongue-in-cheek, but too subtle

[Michelangelo11]

Came here to post exactly this. Is there, really?

[sjbzbeiks]

I would guess so, they seem interested in the ring cameras https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2025/09/30/ring-police-partn...

[IanCal]

The cost of sharing recordings of video you collect anyway is near 0, and this provides videos of public places.

What's the value of a recording inside my house to the police? That requires paying a human to go around recording it?

[wizzwizz4]

The cost of sharing recordings of video you collect anyway is near 0. If not police, many stalkers would definitely appreciate this information.

[Geezus_42]

Even if my neighborhood is a public place, I don't agree that most public places should have 24hr video surveillance.

[toasty228]

They'd save money if they knew exactly which spot of the wall to shoot through to kill the innocent sleeping person next door, that's at least a few dollars a week in bullets alone.

[bragr]

>There is plenty of money to be made selling home layouts to police.

The police basically already have this in the form of building records. Unless you live in a really old building or you've made unapproved modifications, they've got an accurate layout if they care to look.

[jjulius]

There's nuance, though. You're right in that they can get a general layout of the rooms in the home, but a mapped layout from a device like this gives them a lot more detailed information - where large objects are that potential targets could hide behind, or stash things.

One data point offers a drawing of where the walls are, another paints a picture of where everything the occupant owns is sitting.

[bragr]

There is some nuance, but in real life the SWAT teams will just crash a bearcat through the wall and fly a cheap drone through the hole to scope out the situation if need be. And as for searching, they don't need a scan to know how to upend everything in a house. People aren't robots, once they're inside, they have their own situational awareness.

The real privacy nightmare with this data to me is marketers mining it for what you have or don't have in your home and hyper targeting you that you need to buy a new coffee table or whatever.

[jjulius]

> ... fly a cheap drone through the hole...

Until someone inside shoots it. Much easier to just grab data from yesterday's cleaning. But perhaps I'm overthinking that? I do tend to lean into the idea that SWAT seem to be more of the Leroy Jenkins, times-up-let's-do-this, smash-and-grab types.

> The real privacy nightmare with this data to me...

Oh absolutely, totally agree there.

[petesergeant]

This sounds like a decent deal for the segment of customers who are happy to have their shopping preferences mapped (which seems to be almost all) and don’t care if a 3rd party has their home layout.

[Ylpertnodi]

My home layout was approved by the local council, and is freely available for anyone to see. I get personal belongings, but who cares about home layout?

[Broken_Hippo]

You are conflicting room layout to home layout. In genreal, blueprints or something similar are available. Where your bed, sofa, and tables are located isn't.

[Ylpertnodi]

"Abort! Abort! The bastard is painting. He's moved the sofa."

[ifh-hn]

Haha, yeah. Exactly my thoughts.

[jiaosdjf]

The Stasi would blush

[i7l]

> There is plenty of money to be made selling home layouts to police.

Perhaps more to thieves who can make sure they break into a place worth raiding.

[jMyles]

No reason to reprhase-and-repeat.

[drbojingle]

If the service is free, the product is you.

[dawnerd]

Insurance companies too. They were one of the first ones to map out in detail building plans for entire cities.