I recently purchased a Neato Robotics Neato XV Signature Pro. We went with the Neato over the iRobot Roomba because the Neato actively maps the room. I've been impressed with how well the Neato works.
Originally I thought it might be marginally useful, would pick up some dust and dirt but we would have to vacuum by hand every so often. This doesn't appear to the case. Its room mapping and edge following work pretty well, it can climb up onto rugs without trouble and generally the floors (all hard floors on the first floor, except for a few rugs) are the cleanest they've ever been, and consistently so. We schedule the Neato to run almost every day, usually when we are home in case we need to pull a dog toy out of its brush or get it out from under the dining room table where it got in between all of the pushed in chairs but then couldn't find its way out. Which brings me to the topic of this post.
Dear Neato Robotics,
You should consider leveraging the interest and expertise of the community of robot hackers to build an even better product. A considerable amount of time has gone into figuring out how the Neato Lidar system works, organizing information about hacking the product, or trying to add useful new features like a side brush for better edge cleaning.
Originally I thought it might be marginally useful, would pick up some dust and dirt but we would have to vacuum by hand every so often. This doesn't appear to the case. Its room mapping and edge following work pretty well, it can climb up onto rugs without trouble and generally the floors (all hard floors on the first floor, except for a few rugs) are the cleanest they've ever been, and consistently so. We schedule the Neato to run almost every day, usually when we are home in case we need to pull a dog toy out of its brush or get it out from under the dining room table where it got in between all of the pushed in chairs but then couldn't find its way out. Which brings me to the topic of this post.
Dear Neato Robotics,
You should consider leveraging the interest and expertise of the community of robot hackers to build an even better product. A considerable amount of time has gone into figuring out how the Neato Lidar system works, organizing information about hacking the product, or trying to add useful new features like a side brush for better edge cleaning.
Why not attempt to take advantage of this community? Providing a standard hardware and software interface might accelerate improvements in the floor mapping system. Individuals may build systems to add wireless connectivity so you might get a helpful reminder from your Neato about it being stuck or needing its dust bin cleaned. Better hardware details could open up improvements to the battery system that might enable the use of Li-Ion batteries for longer battery life. Companies can't build or test all of the odd ideas that are developed internally. It costs too much, in terms of time and dollars, to develop these ideas and present them to your customers. By letting the hobbyist try some of these ideas out it would be possible to watch to see the level of interest from each one and to use that as an input into product development.
Being open with the community is likely to yield some useful product ideas, improvements and engineering concepts that can be folded back into the next versions of the product, but it can also be a marketing and public relations tool.
The hobbyist groups most likely to work on these technical areas of the robots can represent a new set of product champions and they may not overlap with the current set of customers.
I'd encourage you to take advantage of the interest people have and to use it to differentiate your business from your competitors. I believe that you could do so in a way that would both protect your IP and leverage the work of others.
Regards,
Chris Morgan
Did you get any answers ?
ReplyDeleteHi Thomas.
ReplyDeleteI haven't. I looked at the Neato website and they've made some big improvements since I checked last several months ago. Their new vacuums have lithium ion batteries and wifi.
It would still be cool to see if the hacker/maker community could make their product even better wig some amount of openness or cooperation. Feels like there is free engineering and product development out there if they were willing to share a bit.
What is your interest in Neato btw?
Chris
I just got the wifi version of the bot and from what I've seen so far, this open letter still very much applies to Neato; they refuse to provide API access over the IP interface (no fun!), and have even removed a lot of the online documentation of the existing serial API. There's a huge interest in this type of stuff from the Home Automation community, and it seems they've been stonewalled, though many of them have found varying, but limited ways around that.
ReplyDelete