DJI puts a drone’s brain in a robot vacuum called ROMO

DJI, that company famous for making drones that deftly avoid trees and buildings, has decided those same skills are perfect for avoiding chair legs and stray cables.

They’ve just launched their first robot vacuum series, called ROMO, and it’s packed with tech transplanted straight from their flying cameras.

LiDAR and dual fisheye cameras on board

Now, ROMO may look like any other circular robot vacuum cleaner from a distance, but it’s actually packed with tech. The headline act here is the sensing system.

This thing uses the same kind of solid-state LiDAR and dual fisheye cameras you’d find on a high-end DJI drone. Combined with some machine learning, that gives ROMO what DJI calls “millimetre-level” obstacle sensing.

The claim is it can spot and smoothly steer around annoyingly thin stuff, like a charging cable or even a playing card left on the floor.

That same tech also allows the robot to use mapping tech refined from drones to plot efficient routes. It has little arms that pop out to get right into corners and along edges, and it can automatically slow its brushes if it spots loose debris like pet litter to avoid scattering it everywhere.

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Once it’s done the job, it tucks itself back into the base station. The station automatically washes and dries the mop pads with high-pressure sprays, and it’s designed to hold up to 200 days of dirt before you need to empty it.

Right now, the ROMO series is only available for pre-order in Korea. Prices start at 1,590,000 KRW (Rs 99,078) for the ROMO S and go up to 1,940,000 KRW (Rs 1,20,888) for the see-through ROMO P.