Hello HN, we have completely reinvented Robot Floor Cleaners with tesla-like cameras only approach with just 5-RGB cameras and all processing on device (no cloud). It's private by design. Please ask any question you may have and send us your feedback. Thanks!
Check out maticrobots.com. I am obviously biased as I am one of the co-founders but we truly have built the next-gen 10x better, fully autonomous mopping and vacuuming bot.
We have everything you mention above and have HEPA bags.
We went against self-emptying because 1) those docks looks ugly - my wife calls them rocket ships and don’t want it in our home. 2) building vacuum that cleans vacuum and makes a crazy loud noise just seemed so inelegant.
Heh, the "drive up to trashbin and call for help" approach looks workable if the bags are big enough. Looking forward to hearing about it again when it doesn't need an iOS device.
1. We have HEPA bags - each bag acts as HEPA filter.
2. We found that more than suction power, the brush roll is more import for effective sweeping and vacuuming. It picks the dirt way better… so we have designed first of its kind to hair tangle-free brush roll. It is designed to be effective on all kids of surfaces.
3. We further improve efficacy with actuating cleaning head so it adjust the height for each type of surface with diff thicknesses.
4. The HEPA bags last a month if just vacuuming and about a week if daily vacuuming and mopping. It collects both wet and dry messes. It even has version of diaper salt and charcoal powder so it doesn’t smell or get moldy.
5. But the most important is completely Vision first perception with precision 3D system so that it doesn’t get stuck, chew wires, etc.
Indoor world is entirely built by humans, for humans, to fit our vision first perception system. So we have given it a very similar perception system.
6. Private by design. It was built to work completely w/o internet connection.
Looked very promising, but there are some hard blockers:
1. It's not shipping yet, meaning there are no trustworthy reviews.
2. It will be shipped to USA only.
3. It needs apple device for (full) control.
Similar price point as a S8 Pro Ultra, but without a dock. The dock is actually really nice cause it stores water / dirt and more importantly... cleans the mop after use. Membership is also a non-starter for me.
I think you're going to have a hard time competing against the S8.
The choice of lack of dock is deliberate one -- when we did research with our target audience -- familes and working parents with kids/pets, we realized that they actually do not like the large dock for few reasons:
1) It's ugly - family homes are very carefully decorated and most don't want the big dock in the room.
2) It's extremely loud -- again, it's a matter of preference but it's like rocket taking off every time it vacuums the vacuum. And, even the self-cleaning mopping is noisy. It still doesn't cover for the fact that it just drags dirt around between those cleaning cycles.
3) We heard from familes that they hated the smelly dirty water and did not know where to throw it.
Again, I'll refer to back to noise but for lost of pets and kids, the noise of dock and the robot are very scary. I know because my Golden hated it and my 3-year old would cry everytime the rocket took off.
Based on the response so far to pre-orders, we're very optimistic that it's resonating. Thanks!
1) agreed, it is bulky and a bit ugly, but it also fits perfectly under the sink in my kitchen, so this isn't an issue for me. It isn't like a regular vacuum isn't bulky and ugly either.
2) it is loud for about 30 seconds as it sucks what is in the robot into its own bagged storage. not a big deal at all.
3) it is a lid sealed container of dirty water that you just pour down the sink or a toilet after it is done cleaning. this isn't rocket science here.
4) I'm not worried about someone in China seeing me in my underpants. My house and images and what I paid for it are already listed in MLS. This is classic making a big deal out of something that really isn't a big deal.
5) Do you know how many S8's have been sold? That would be the real comparison with your pre-orders. My bet is that they are orders of magnitude higher.
Also, families care a lot about privacy, and right or wrong, there's an inheritant mistrust of cloud based disc bots and especially those coming from China. We do not beleive anyone of the disc bot companies have wrong intentions or anything, but I know that I wasn't comfortable with our home data going to cloud.
Hence, we started with the premise that we shouldn't have to compromise our privacy to keep our floors clean. Thanks!
Ultimately, we're striving for great user experience which we can do with the bags. Our goal is to make bags as cheap as possible and already it's a $3/bag which is way cheaper than any other robovac bags if we're not mistaken.
That's also why we have all-you-can-clean membership plan -- it's optional and users can purchase bags a al carte, but with it's unlimited bags. mop rolls, extended warranty, and accidental coverage it's really a great peace of mind for our users.
Our goal is to provide great customer experience first and formost with a higest quality product. Thanks!
Hi, I'm in the UK and interested in knowing more about Matic. Do you have any plans to ship to the UK any time soon? You mention the device is private by design (this is a huge selling point for me). Does Matic support MQTT or any other open protocol to allow integration with Home Assistant?
We will ship to UK as soon as we can - just starting with the US for now. In terms of integration with Home Assistants -- again zero problem in doing this. We will eventually get there, but we want to make sure that we do it in a way where privacy is still maintained. We do not want to enable it if it means sharing private data of any kind with home assitant companies.
Thanks, Looks really nice and exactly what I am looking for. I want to mention that my first reaction was “it’s huge, where do i even put it?”
And make sure you ship outside the US!
In terms of size, it's ~1x1 feet and far smaller than some of the docks that come with disc bots these days.
The reason for 1 feet height is that we are giving it a same top-down vantage point that we humans have. Flat designs will give ant-like vantage point which makes seeing what's in front it rather hard.
Human like vantage point also means it builds maps that both the robot and humans can easily understand and recognize all the objects. Thanks!
Hey All, we (maticrobots.com) have built a local-only fully autonomous robot mop and vacuum. We just use 5 RGB cameras with all on the edge device processings. We send even the map data to app using local WiFi. No cloud at all.
Matic builds full matterport like 3D map just using CV. This enables Matic to
Precisely navigate without bumping at all.
We have built 10x better vSLAM than the best open source lib like Orb SLAM.
The latest NN based approaches still fall short of ORB-SLAM - which is considered the state of the art (in terms implementations). However, it still has only 70% success rate in loop closures.
We tend to measure our accuracy with loop closures and slam graph consistency over time.
Matic keeps both static (historical map) and dynamic constant live mapping. So it constantly observes changes live all the time — just the way we do. And it keeps merging these changes in the slam graph/maps.
Single pixel lidars are not enough. Anything higher is way too expensive.
Also, Indoor world is designed with our vision first perception. We think robots need to be imbued with similar system. And we believe vision is enough (there’s a reason why nature chose vision based systems for us?)
Three bottlenecks in on fully autonomous indoor robots are:
1. Perception and Precise SLAM
2. Affordability
3. Privacy.
All three are feasible with Tesla like cameras only approach.
Problem with indoor robots isn’t sensors — it’s lack of brains/algorithms.
Thank you. Cleaning head is 2 inches tall and extends up to 3 inches below furniture. It cleans all the visible dirt and goes underneath anything that’s taller than ~14”.
It’s designed to clean visible dirt thoroughly.
Frankly, if primary use case is cleaning underneath furniture than disc robots are great already.
Thanks, that makes sense. For context: having little kids we also keep all the crawl-accessible spaces pretty clean which includes under couches etc. Manual vacuum immediately for any obvious mess to keep it from spreading, robot to handle tediously complete levels of coverage.
Totally understand and the use case and really appreciate your feedback. We hope to resolve that in diff way. Just things kind of like truck vs suv vs sedan — we will just need diff form factor.
With this one, we really want to eliminate day to day use.
I've used three generations of vacuum robots, with the latter two being Valetudo-supported:
* Eufy RoboVac 11 (no lidar, the "stumble around triggering front bumper" locomotion)
* Dreame Z10 Pro (lidar, base station vacuum emptying, mop attachment)
* Dreame L10s Ultra (lidar/camera, base station vacuum emptying plus clean/waste water for integrated mopping)
I root a second a vacuum for my partner's place, but past that it's very hard to recommend a Valetudo setup to someone remote who doesn't have the technical skills to do the rooting and install procedure. So the Matic is potentially appealing to me, even if I never end up using one myself.
Looking at the Matic page: I think this is aimed at people with very cluttered houses, i.e. folks with young kids? The implicit pitch here seems to be, "it doesn't matter how cluttered your house is; this little robot can get in there to clean without tangling".
Except... that's never made explicit? It's just a lot of photos of very cluttered spaces. I'm left to connect the dots.
Customers aren't going to care about "Real-time 3D floor mapping" or "Cutting-edge vision software". They want "Won't trip over your (sometimes literal) shit".
Vacuum feature wise, it seems like table stakes and not much past that? I only just upgraded to the L10s Ultra, which has a larger base station that includes two water containers--one for clean water, and one for waste water. The robot returns to the base station to cycle water and clean the mop pads every X square meters (configurable). This does such a better job actually mopping, compared to the Z10 Pro's mop attachment. It lifts the mop pads when it crosses carpet, so it can even mop the other side of large area rugs that fill rooms. I suspect the Matic's mopping will be only marginally okay, especially with no mechanism to automatically clean the mop pad?
Rubber roller seems to be common on newer robots too.
Having a charger-only base station seems really limiting (versus emptying on-robot waste into a larger bag on the base station itself).
I picked up a second L10s Ultra for my partner's place for $630 during the black friday period, so price-wise it's going to be an uphill battle. Honestly, though, I don't think people willing to pay $1k for a cleaning device are all that price sensitive. I'm trading money for convenience, and I would absolutely trade more money for more convenience if I clearly understood the convenience on offer.
Lack of Home Assistant integration makes it a no-go for me personally, as a technical user, but I realize the average person isn't going to care (and probably you shouldn't either). If you did want to support Home Assistant, I think the shortest path would be MQTT support. You don't need to do a custom integration. It's fully discoverable and automatic if you adhere to their expected structure: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/vacuum.mqtt/
Anyway, no idea if any of that is useful, especially since "nerdy person who roots consumer hardware" isn't exactly your target market, but maybe something in that brain dump is useful info!
1. Yes, our core users are young families: working parents with young children and pets. Clutter and rate of entropy is just higher. :)
2. The fundamental reason for reengineering and reinventing robot floor cleaners with Matic is that disc robots are relatively inferior and suck (literally and figuratively).
Few issues that I as user encountered: 1) constantly getting stuck, chewing wires, dog toys, etc. 2) small bin size and my wife hates the big docks - she just thinks they are ugly. (People go out of their way to hide appliances behind cabinets, so why do we need to tolerate these ugly bricks. 3) Noise. Not only vacuum is noisy but docks are like rocket ship taking off - doesn’t work with pets or young kiddos. 4) Can’t get to sides and corners - circle shape. Vacuum at the bottom is literally 2 inches away from the side 5) and, can’t tell it where, what, how to clean. Most times I don’t want the whole home cleaned or whole room — I just need to clean kitchen are clean where we cook/chop veggies etc.
** However, it just doesn’t make sense to why we are tolerating these Gen 1 robots that were invented in early 2000s. They were great for that time. But they are Nokias and Blackberries. Now tech and AI is so much better, so it’s time to reinvent and build iPhone of home robots.
(200+ self driving car start-ups, same amount building industrial robots, none in home space…why?)
2. We believe that just like self-driving cars need Google Street View maps (which Sebastian Thrun built first) and GPS, fully autonomous indoor robots need precise SLAM and high fidelity 3D maps. With Matic, we are letting robots build maps on the fly and remember its location in precise manner.
3. You are right that mostly we have built table stakes features. However, the it’s about HOW we have built them. With our vision-first approach, disc robot ceiling is our floor. That’s just the foundation.
And HOW is about making robot that actually works and is intelligent.
How can we call robot intelligent if it continuously needs to bump? If it doesn’t even know what’s in front of it?
A robot that can navigate our home the way we do is in itself a huge step forward and for that it needs precise and dynamic maps (we constantly observe when things move).
We have done few things:
- reinvented sweeping and vacuuming to adjust suction, brush roll speed, height of CH etc. based on type of surface and type of dirt. (We don’t take vacuums over rugs with frills and we mop wine stains - why can’t robot do that).
- first if it’s kind self-cleaning mop that doesn’t just drag dirt with it like mop pads. Instead we squeeze dirty water and dirt out the bin with every turn.
- a completely new mobility system invented for the modern homes. disc robots don’t climb shag rugs. We do.
- quiet. Vacuums at 55dBA and mops at 52dBA. This is really important for robots to do things on our behalf in homes. They can’t be noisy.
- with our ID not only families love looking at it but kids and pets are not afraid of it.
And, we are just getting started. By end of the next year we will be adding embeddings and simple chat like command/control based on visual maps.
Sort of a strange question on a Valetudo thread, but have you used Valetudo on a lidar-enabled robot? You can easily clean specific rooms, and I've never seen a lidar robot get lost, and very rarely stuck (usually something like managing to close a bathroom door behind itself).
But anyway: I do think it's worth tripling down on your "average busy person with a cluttered house" pitch. 3D mapping is a huge distraction, although I get that it's unique and your team is proud of it. You're selling the features it enables!
If your site's first content was a time lapse video of Matic navigating a living room covered in toys and charging cords that would tangle most robots, though...
Will add lot of it... before it can navigate precisely, it has to know what's in front of it. Lidar is a one-laser, it cannot see what's above or beyond that one pointer, so it's bumps and tangles with wires/tassles etc. all the time.
Imagine if you could only see just one-inch ehigh of what's in front of you -- not below or above -- then you'd un into tables or chairs all the time. Single pixel lidars are sort of like that.
I understand. IR security cameras can see the beam. Most have a kinect-like dot pattern that isn't purely horizontal, but that's neither here nor there.
I still don't think it's worth much attention. "It's better at avoiding tangles because it sees the world in full 3D".
