Petteri Pyyny
4 Aug 2026 16:33
The excellence of modern, better robot vacuum cleaners compared to the curse-inducing contraptions of the 2010s largely lies in their ability to avoid all obstacles on the floor, cope with carpets, and generally not require you to clear the apartment at all.
But many are also concerned by the fact that almost all robot vacuum cleaners are Chinese and have cameras. Cameras are, of course, practically mandatory because precisely that excellent, life-easing obstacle avoidance is based on cameras and depth perception.
Concern for privacy is, of course, understandable. In addition, modern robot vacuums rely heavily on cloud services provided by manufacturers - which means that if the manufacturer goes bankrupt, the robot turns into an expensive paperweight. This is what happened when Neato ceased its operations.
Solutions have been developed for these problems, the best known of which is probably Valetudo, an open source alternative operating system for robot vacuum cleaners.
However, the big problem with Valetudo is that installing it on a robot vacuum usually requires such a level of tinkering that the average consumer's skills quickly run out.
But what if the entire robot vacuum cleaner was implemented entirely in the spirit of open source...?
OOMWOO is exactly this. It is an open source project still under development, which is quite ambitious.
Firstly, for it, its own robot firmware and a mobile application have been developed (partially built on Valetudo), both of which are open source.
But even more ambitious is that the robot itself is self-assemblable. At OOMWOO's core hums a Raspberry Pi mini-computer, and all other key parts of the robot have been selected from readily available electronic components.
The frame, in turn, is 3D-printed based on openly published 3D models.
The OOMWOO project is still very much a work in progress, but you can follow it on its Github page and participate in the development if you wish.
The intended outcome would be a robot vacuum cleaner completely independent of cloud services, featuring camera-based obstacle avoidance, floor surface material recognition, extensive map editing tools - and truly open APIs for developers to tinker with.