yes, that ALSO.
Listen, do you want to come over and paint for me?
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Sure.
Can you give me the accurate size of the area you wish to get painted so I can calculate an estimate to quote?
Sure, it’s a 700 room public housing complex. I was hoping in a few years to release a few drones to do my measurements, but I suppose thats the kind of work folks like you want to watch people do, room by room.
You can help by taking the measurements.
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You just won my personal daily internet.
The possibilities of puns here make me miss @japhroaig even more.
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You very well might be able to do this with drones, even using present-day tech, but Roombas? Not bloody likely. Nor has the company exposed that information for YOUR use, in the 1st place. And yes, you’d have to take at least gross measurements to get a reliable quote from your contractor(s). And no, a Google phone is not a Roomba =) .
In that case, there should be architect’s plans available; you might have to go to your local planning department’s archives to get a copy. (The owner/operator should have a (kept up to date) set of the plans, but that’s usually just wishful thinking.)
That’s all a quantity surveyer needs to prepare a tendering procedure.
Stuff like that was part of my job for the last 20 years or so. If you send me the data, I can quote you an estimate for my fee, which will be subject to the terms and conditions of the HOAI.
Project Tango? Thought it to be in limbo, since the TC article was.published Feb.2014 - but a quick check on Wikipedia told me it’s quite alive. Zenfone AR… Interesting… If I had application, it’d love to play with that…
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Here I’m wondering if I could use a raspberry pi to make Roomba think my house was in Argleton.
There is nothing more trustworthy than an unhelpfully vague or suspiciously specific denial issued in response to bad PR; so I’m sure we can consider this matter settled. No need for churlish delving into what the terms and conditions actually say.
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HA! That is all wishful thinking, not even just the last part. This is public housing. Heck, this is ANY building. Do you think the building department has as-builts of a house from the 50s? a commercial plaza from the 70s? a condo from th 90s?? Not actually. I’ve surely tried that. I can wait a month to get rolls and rolls of original blueprints, sometimes, if they can find them, IF they ever filed them. Now, do you have a 24x36 scanner and a couple CAD operators laying around for cheap?
Those plans are just not in a ‘close enough’ 3D CAD file in my computer. That’s a lot of work to do to take those and work them into 3D. We could put 3d sensors and cameras on existing and other robots and integrate their operation. Google’s done it to the outside of my house, I don’t really mind them having done so from the inside at some point, as it’s exactly the sort of info i’d like when looking at purchasing a structure, or painting it, or looking for problems in it.
The roomba aspect is one sort of way to collect parts of the dataset I envision as being useful. Working from plans is great and all, but they’re not as-built, and they’re a lot more work than going and looking yourself - which is the very problem they’re looking to solve.
Do the latest Roombas have GPS? If not, then they don’t really have a way to connect your floor plan with a physical location. If they do … well, I don’t think GPS would be much use for interior navigation. I think its only use would be to locate the Roomba in the world. (It can get the time from the wifi router.)
I guess the next step would be to watch the traffic between the Roomba and the mothership.
You can get surprisingly good location data without GPS, if you have network access and at least one common radio: there are a number of outfits who build databases of wifi APs, cell towers, and similar(Skyhook is one; Google’s ‘street view’ cars also do RF sniffing, not sure if Apple farms it out or does it in house).
The databases are fairly large; and need to be current to be useful, so offline use compares poorly to GPS(if the vendor even gives you the ability to see the database itself, not just submit location queries); but it works pretty well in reasonably thickly settled areas with lots of RF sources.
Ours would. Well, mostly.
1950ies housing might be a bit sketchy.
The state building codes in their current form, which also include regulations on documentation and archives, were introduced in 1962. Regulations before that go back to the early 19th century, but are an odd mixture of state and local regulations that would sometimes be incoherent or even contradicting in some points. So everything built after 1962 would have some sort of paper trail, and that includes modifications1) on buildings that already existed in 1962.
1) Modifications that require approval by the planning department. Which includes anything that touches the structural design or fire safety. The rest varies somewhat. If it’s a building listed for preservation, practically everything needs approval. Unlisted buildings: any significant changes. Changes both regarding the building itself and what it is used for require permission. For instance, changing an office into a flat or vice versa, or changing a retail store into a restaurant, requires approval. If you do not use a building in the way it was approved, you’d not only be in trouble with the planning department, but also your insurance company. There are usually clauses in the contracts that make any non-approved usage a breach of contract and trigger the “no soup for you” clauses.
But commercial plaza, definitely. Buildings like that are checked every five years by the local planning department and the fire department; the focus being changes done without planning approval and anything related to safety in general and fire safety in detail. They are also checked for any deviations in the as-built from the as-approved before they open for the first time, of course.
Condos and such, that would depend somewhat on the age and size, as the building codes for larger structures (with a larger number of people inside) are stricter, and that means a larger and more detailed set of documents that has to be forwarded to the planning department for approval.
The planning department keeps a file on every building for as long as it exists, from the building permit to the approval of its demolition. What the file contains in any given case depends somewhat on the age of the building, see above. In general, its everything ever submitted to the planning department as required by state building code, plus everything else they managed to lay hands on.
When a building is demolished, the planning department closes their file on it - and forward it to the city archives.
So, unless it’s a building that has somehow managed for decades to fly completely under the planning department’s radar, so to speak, you’d find something in the files that is at least a close approximation to the existing condition.
Answering myself, a bit, since reading the linked article provided this gem:
If a user agrees to having their map data viewable on their mobile device, then the map that the Roomba creates during a cleaning job is sent to the cloud where it is processed and simplified to produce a user-friendly map that ultimately appears in the iRobot HOME App.
And:
Where does data like photos or images taken from the camera get stored? Is it ever stored outside the home? If so, how is imagery data being used? Is it just being parsed and sent back to the robot, or is it being used to populate a larger database?
The Roomba 900 Series vacuuming robots capture mapping and navigation information via vSLAM, which stays on the robot.
“Stays on the robot” is only slightly open to interpretation - could actually mean it is stored on the robot (which is unlikely, actually, since this would be quite an amount of days after some time).
This still doesn’t explain why I thought the mapping would be airgapped from the remote control via irobot’s server. Plus, it’s not a direct quote from the CEO, but from an anonymous spokesperson in an e-mail interview.
For a company that successful and that large, this is quite lame a reaction. (Doesn’t compare to dieselgate, on the other hand… 
)
What’s in this data? Is it just room dimensions and furniture positioning? Or is it a complete photographic record of the space?
I can’t see how Google or Amazon would use the former. Maybe notice you have room for a larger TV or couch and try to sell you those things?
I try not to underestimate the power of lots of seemingly trivial bits of data combined into something very informative but I can’t help thinking even Google and Amazon were at a loss for ideas for this data (assuming they even considered it).
Since it has wheels, shouldn’t that be “Roomba rolls back plan to sell maps…”?
The map of its roll-back on maps:
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