Can your vacuum spill your home’s secrets?
Companies prioritize robot security
As homes become smarter and more connected — the garage door talking to the security camera, which talks to the light switches, and all of them, including the vacuum cleaner, interfacing with our smartphones — issues surrounding privacy and security are forefront in the design process.
“Making sure of the security is something we’ve spent a lot of time on, and a lot of money and effort on,” says Rob Green, a senior design engineer at Dyson, and one of the designers behind Dyson’s new 360 Eye Robot vacuum cleaner.
Eighteen years in the making, the Eye Robot uses SLAM ( simultaneous localization and mapping) to make detailed floor maps of any room it enters by taking 360-degree photos at 30 frames a second.
Green says “it’s looking at the top of a door frame or bookcase or picture and saying ‘OK, there’s a very strong defined corner, I’m going to mark that down and as I move forward I’ ll get closer to that point and farther from this point I marked behind me, so I know these are obstacles’” in the space.
Questions surrounding privacy come up, Green says, because the maps that the robot’s camera generates can be viewed on users’ devices by downloading an app.
“We get asked a lot about images because obviously you do have this camera recording images within your home,” Green says. People might be concerned about having their art collection, wine storage or other valuables that are in plain sight, recorded and potentially available to a thief. It’s worth asking about when buying such products.
“Actually, the camera and the memory is kept separate from what people can access from the data that’s in the cloud. It’s only keeping those images for as long as it needs to analyze them, so there’s no record on the machine of those images when the robot goes back to the dock; it wipes all of that off.”
If only it would empty its dust compartment, too.