Video Credit: iRobot

The Internet of Things is plagued by communication breakdowns. While connected thermostats, egg trays, and even forks can beam data to apps and offer phone-based controls, this isn't exactly what we were promised from this technology.

In order for the Internet of Everything to achieve its real promise of context-aware automation without much user input, disparate pieces of hardware must communicate with one another, understand what's going on, and control themselves accordingly. Like a sentient being, your home should “know” when to preheat the oven, turn on a bedside lamp, or brew a fresh pot of coffee. If you're using an app, you're essentially using a remote control. There's nothing particularly "smart" about that.

The Internet of Things is going to simplify our lives. But we need some tech that doesn't yet exist to see that happen.

Colin Angle, the CEO of iRobot, thinks making the Internet of Things more useful means marginalizing apps in favor of maps. The company recently announced that by the end of this year, it will market a robot that can create a map of your home—and R&D is investing efforts in giving that bot that ability to recognize and label everything in it using a camera and a cloud-based engine1. It will use that info to drive next-generation operating systems for connected homes.

“This idea that the Internet of Things is going to simplify our lives—I think it will, but we’re going to need some technology that doesn’t yet exist in order to take the benefits,” Angle told WIRED. “What you don’t want is eight gazillion apps on the phone for every single component… What we need to do to improve things rather than make them more complicated is to have our homes be able to track the intent of the people living in it. And then do the right thing.”

Angle and iRobot aren't interesting in building an OS for the home. Let the big dogs do that. "The big home automation players will be Google and Apple, and I don’t see how anyone else is going to compete with them," he says. However, these in-home maps are intended to become a crucial cross-platform piece of the puzzle. Angle describes the maps and their potential use cases as "the context engine that drives the intent" for future in-home automation.

Angle wouldn’t come out and say that this little cartography bot would be a Roomba, but it certainly seems like a perfect fit. He says iRobot has been focused on taking an expensive laser-rangefinder mapping system and reworking it with cheaper parts to make it accessible to the general public. By replacing the lasers with “an 80-cent camera,” iRobot brought the cost of the system from thousands of dollars to about $20.

Roombas already can detect and avoid objects, but recognizing exactly what those objects are is a different beast entirely. By streaming video from its cameras to a cloud-based object-classification system, it can tell whether the object in front of it is a bookcase or a TV stand, label it accordingly on a map, and share that detailed plan with next-generation home-infrastructure systems.

The camera system wouldn't be the only modification necessary for the Roomba to create maps of your home. Because iRobot's map-making system uses the cloud to analyze, recognize, and label objects, connectivity would need to be built into the robot itself or its charging dock.

By automatically recognizing objects and their locations, maps could dramatically enhance connected systems.

“It’s a camera and cloud-based AI engine where we trained it on faucets by going on the Web, downloading pictures of faucets, and using neural network learning on what makes a faucet,” Angle explains. “I think it’s pretty cool that it can actually differentiate dishwashers from ovens because ovens have windows in the door and dishwashers don’t.”

These current maps are 2D, but Angle says 3D maps aren’t far behind. By automatically recognizing objects and their places in the home, even the flat maps could dramatically enhance in-home systems. To prove it, Angle showed me how this works: Opening his laptop, he plays a simple animation of a little dot scooting around a home’s floorplan. “Watch this and tell me what just happened.”

The dot moves through the front door, pauses by the dining room table, enters the kitchen, pauses in front of the refrigerator, then makes a bee-line for the couch. The dot is clearly coming home, putting its stuff down, grabbing a snack or a beer from the fridge, and sitting down on the couch to watch TV.

“That is enough context for the house to know exactly what to do,” Angle says. “Without ever touching anything, your favorite channel can come on, the lights can come on, the temperature can adjust in the right places … You don’t care about what the temperature is on the wall here, you care about the temperature on the couch, because that’s where you’re at.”

Of course, the map can’t automate all these tasks. But as more and more traditional appliances feature their own sensors and connectivity, having a map that includes the smart components in your home could drive interoperability between devices without app input. Based on a person’s location in the home, things would just magically react in an appropriate way.

According to Angle, it’s even possible to automate tasks without having to track a user’s location. With door sensors, smart fridges, and connected cookware, a simple sequence of events could be enough to trigger actions.

“You can infer the same sort of thing without having to track the person, as long as that information is being uploaded within the context of the map,” Angle explains. “The devices would need to be connected in order to track that temporal sequence, in order to determine intent.”

While Roomba already cleans floors, the upcoming map-bot could pave the way for a bonafide, all-knowing Rosie the Robot. A combination of a 3D-mapping system, a mobile robot with an arm, and a picture of a pristine home would help robots do much more than vacuum.

“There’ll be a moment where you can put everything in your house the way you want it to be, capture it, and say ‘keep it this way,’” Angle explains. “[The robot] can go and put everything away because everything has a place.”

1UPDATE 5:20 PM ET 05/26/15: This story has been updated to correct that while iRobot will bring a mapping robot to homes by the end of the year, the ability to label and recognize objects remains an R&D project.