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Show HN: We built a camera only robot vacuum for less than 300$ (Well almost)

42 points by indraneelpatil

by elaus

2 subcomments

I don't really see how the vacuum can effectively clean a whole room or flat using only a CNN of the current image in front of the robot. This would help detect obstacles, but a bumper sensor would do that as well.
All but the most basic vacuum robots map their work area and devise plans how to clean them systematically. The others just bump into obstacles, rotate a random amount and continue forward.
Don't get me wrong, I love this project and the idea to build it yourself. I just feel like that (huge) part is missing in the article?

by isoprophlex

0 subcomment

Cool project! That validation loss curve screams train set memorization without generalization ability.
Too little train data, and/or data of insufficient quality. Maybe let the robot run autonomously with an (expensive) VLM operating it to bootstrap a larger train dataset without needing to annotate it yourself.
Or maybe the problem itself is poorly specified, or intractable with your chosen network architecture. But if you see that a vision llm can pilot the bot, at least you know you have a fighting chance.

by amelius

0 subcomment

The trick is to make a robot that has a Lidar and a camera, then train a model that can replace the Lidar.
(Lidar can of course also be echolocation).

by vachanmn123

0 subcomment

Check out using maybe some kind of monocular depth estimation models, like Apple's Depth Pro (https://github.com/apple/ml-depth-pro) and use the depth map to predict a path?
Very cool project though!

by villgax

0 subcomment

There’s things like SLAM, optical flow etc, read up on things instead of being so defeatist IMO even for a hobby project, seems so forced