We built a camera only robot vacuum for less than $300 (well almost)
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HN · launched Apr 6, 2026 · 109 upvotes (top 10%) · 0 views
Niche: smart home and iot devices · 59 launches, 2 in the last 7 days ▼ -60% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Hardware & robotics
- B2C
- AI feature
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 59 launches in smart home and iot devices →
Could you build this?
No This is a physical robotics project requiring hardware design, motor control, sensor streaming, and custom behavioral cloning machine learning models.
What it would actually take: A production implementation requires an embedded system (e.g. Raspberry Pi / Jetson or custom microcontroller board), motor drivers, vacuum impeller hardware, chassis, and a camera module. Software involves a real-time teleoperation pipeline, streaming video over WebRTC/sockets to a GPU host running PyTorch, and training a continuous control/imitation learning policy. Key challenges include latency-critical closed-loop control, sensor noise, edge hardware reliability, and safety fallbacks.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: NVIDIA Physical AI environments, SLAM-equipped robot vacuums, LiDAR-based vacuum mappers
Concerns raised: Generalization to furniture movement and different lighting conditions, Distribution shift between sim training and real-world deployment, Blocked routes causing navigation failures, Noise and wear-and-tear from extended operation, Glass doors misidentified as open spaces in mapping
Feature requests: Video tutorial on how to use the system, Model distillation to smaller/faster models, Frame stacking to improve model input, VQA-based offline route planning for open-ended tasks, Automatic home replica generation from camera images using SFM
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 148 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #21 of 149 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 153 days after the earliest competitor.
- Piggy Robotics - Humanoid robots · yc · 2025-11-21 · 753 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Nori: The $1688 humanoid robot · yc · 2026-08-20 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- We sent a humanoid robot to clean a stranger's apartment in SF · hn · 2026-05-15 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- I built a tiny camera that knows where it is · hn · 2026-09-15 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- 1.5-joint-module · github · 2026-11-02 · 164 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- We made a cinematic heist trailer with 4 AI models for $60 · hn · 2026-05-26 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- YOR · hn · 2026-02-12 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- HLabs: US-made robot actuators and electronics · yc · 2026-03-10 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.43
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