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

Team: Bruce Kim, Indraneel Patil

Bruce and I moved in together and were discussing buying a robot vacuum, but then decided to build one instead! Some design principles:

Buy as many off the shelf parts as possible Keep the budget less than 500$ It should have a minimum battery life to be able to navigate around the house and vacuum the floor, so that we only have to charge it once a week

Hardware

Software

Since we dont have any compute on the robot to do inference we decided to stream image frames from the robot to a laptop and then run inference on the robot and return result back to the robot for navigation. We teleoperated the robot around the house to collect tuples of image frame and a discrete navigation action. Our discrete navigation action set was:

COMMANDS = { keyboard . Key . up : " FORWARD

" , keyboard . Key . down : " REVERSE

" , keyboard . Key . left : " TURN_CCW

" , keyboard . Key . right : " TURN_CW

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