Roombas will soon build a Wi-Fi coverage map while they clean
iRobot CEO Colin Angle has talked a lot about his company’s plans to make its popular robotic vacuum and integral part of the connected home. Honestly though, those plans have been pretty vague. Today’s announcement of indoor WiFi mapping does offer a bit of insight into where the company is headed, however.
The feature is arriving later this month on the iRobot app, making it possible for WiFi-enabled Roombas to create a map of indoor signals. The map exists alongside the existing Clean Map feature, letting users toggle between the two, like they would, say, satellite and standard imagery in Google Maps.
The maps themselves won’t go into too much detail — no upload and download speeds like you see on many mobile speed test apps. Instead, the information will show up as decibel readings. Really, it’s intended as a handy way of showing off where you might want to toss a range extender, to help get rid of dead spots.
