The key to scaling the idea of a smart home could be maps.

iRobot has ostensibly been making smart home devices longer than anyone, but most think of its Roomba robotic vacuum as an appliance and of iRobot as an appliance company. On the cusp of its second quarter century, iRobot thinks it can change that perception by officially entering the smart home field, but through a side door.

“You have to think about the whole house as a system to manage the complexity we’re heaping on ourselves,” iRobot cofounder and CEO Colin Angle said.

Angle has a vision for smart home technology that doesn't involve iRobot adding more task-specific smart devices into the home. Instead, he wants to use low-cost vision systems to build a map of your home and objects and use that to drive smart-device activity, human engagement and interactivity.

He argues that current smart home devices like Nest and Dropcam (both owned by Google), smart door locks (like Lockitron), intelligent home vents from Keen and other connected or Internet of Things devices do not, with their individual apps and walled garden functionalities, offer scalable smart home solutions.

Mapping a space is not new, but laser-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems are prohibitively expensive. iRobot’s AVA 500 office robot uses SLAM. The vision system iRobot is working on will be based on vSLAM, a relatively low-cost mapping system that it picked up when it bought Evolution Robotics in 2012. It sees the room with inexpesive cameras and identifies objects using a cloud-based object-matching system.

“The map becomes [a] construct for tasking a growing team of robots that are in your home,” Angle said.

A map of the home that can identify rooms and which gadgets are in each room could help, especially coupled with robots like Roomba that can access the map, act on it and share the information with other robots. In theory, robots will combine that map data with information about your location based on your phone’s Wi-Fi, GPS or telemetry received from smart home products.

For example, imagine you have a Sleep Number x12 bed. The Roomba knows when you’re in bed and could share that information with other connected devices that are using the map.

“[Humans] are so incredibly predictable that it takes a few data points to say, ‘Oh, that’s what happened,’” Angle said.

And with enough knowledge, the home robots and smart devices can start to act based on your patterns.

To demonstrate, Angle showed me a typical home floor plan with a little blue dot moving from the couch in the living room to the fridge in the kitchen and back to the couch. My guess was that someone was watching TV and went to get snack. Just as I could intuit, so will the robots, which they can use to their advantage to orchestrate their attack — um, I mean, human-assistance routines.

A look at how iRobot's VSLAM technology works. On the left, how it maps an environment. On the right, how it sees a room and recognizes objects. Image: iRobot

On the other hand, iRobot currently only has access to its own robots. It can’t just tap into all the other smart devices; even with something like Apple’s HomeKit smart home platform, there’s no expectation that every third-party smart home device manufacturer will use it.

iRobot just wants to be part of the solution. “We’ll have to work with third parties. We won’t compete with Apple, Google or Honeywell. We’ll be a company that has, after cellphones and set-top boxes, the largest number of connected endpoints in the home,” said Angle, adding that the company has sold 13 million Roomba devices since launching in 2002.

While iRobot's smart home solution is expected sometime later this year, Angle wouldn't offer details on cost or how the vSLAM-based system will look. He did say, though, that it should work with any of the company’s existing robots, so it could be a $20 to $50 add-on for the Roomba or Roombas in your home.

“The natural map maker in the home will be a robot — because home is not a static place,” said Angle.