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Within a few minutes of arriving at the WIRED offices in San Francisco, Matic cofounder Mehul Nariyawala brings up the classic Paul Graham piece on schlep blindness. The essay talks about how engineers will often shrink away from starting a company to tackle a very commonly understood problem simply because solving that problem would require too much work. They don't want to schlep, so they put aside the world-changing idea and instead just go build something easy.
We’re watching the prototype, Matic, slowly work out whether the color differentiations of the concrete floor in the WIRED offices actually signal whether it’s moving from hardwood to carpet. I ask Nariyawala why so many startups compete to create a self-driving car when the problem of creating a simple, effective, yet affordable robot vacuum is right there waiting to be solved.
“We had a chance to work on Waymo,” Nariyawala says, referring to himself and his partner Navneet Dalal, both former Google engineers. (Nariyawala has a degree in bioinformatics and headed Google’s Nest Cam division; Dalal was a senior research scientist at Google Nest.) “But if you make a mistake in a self-driving car, you die … You don't develop true level 5 intelligence from avoiding mistakes. Intelligence comes from learning from your mistakes, instead of being mistake-free.”
The home—especially a chaotic one, with kids and pets—is an incredibly dynamic environment, and the home cleaning space is ripe for disruption. So why hasn’t the robot vacuum changed in design since the 1990s? Matic aims to have a solution to this problem on the market by early 2024. The robovac that we're watching tool around on the floor is a late-stage prototype. So far, it looks pretty good.
A Cuddly Cleaning Companion
I love robot vacuums. I've tested them for years. But as my colleague Simon Hill notes, even after years of development, they still come with an array of problems that no one has solved. The bins are tiny and the self-emptying stations are enormous. Navigation systems that use cameras can be a potential invasion of privacy. You still have to pick up the floor to remove things that could be potential robot vacuum booby traps. This is the imperfect wilderness Matic hopes to tame.
Rather than try to make incremental improvements on the classic robot vacuum disc, Nariyawala and Dalal thought up a new design for a more human-oriented robot vacuum-mop. That entailed changing the entire shape of the vacuum to a white, curved robot, like the egg-shaped probe from Wall-E or the Jibo (RIP). “Kids are afraid of [the Roomba],” Nariyawala says. “We didn’t want kids or dogs to be scared of it.”
Its edges are squared off to let it clean corners effectively, and it has robust wheels to travel throughout the house on all different floor surfaces. Rather than coming to rest in an enormous self-cleaning docking station, it’s taller to accommodate a much larger battery, a clean water reservoir for the mop, and—this actually blew my mind—a disposal bag with both charcoal and diaper salts to pick up both wet and dry messes at the same time. I hadn't seen this in a robot vacuum. Cleaning a dirty water tank clogged with solid debris is so unpleasant that I always do a preliminary vacuum run before mopping. It never occurred to me that you could do both at once.
The next achievement of the Matic hardware lies in the realization that suction power does not always mean your floor will be cleaner. For years, most robot vacuums have been introducing more and more suction power, but all that means is you’re usually just balding your carpets, Nariyawala says with a shrug. Instead, the Matic focuses on more effective agitation of the cleaning surface, with a roller brush whose flippers are much longer than normal. Matic’s mop also lifts over an inch off the surface of the ground, so it doesn't inadvertently drag a damp cloth over your rugs and carpet.
Finally, the vacuum is much, much quieter than almost every vacuum I’ve tested—a mere 55 decibels, or the level of a quiet conversation, versus a much more disruptive 75 decibels, which is, sad to say, about the volume of a lawn mower. All this is in a robot whose battery lasts through about two and a half hours of vacuuming and three hours of mopping.
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From my observation, Nariyawala ran Matic continuously for two hours in the WIRED offices without the robot needing to recharge.
Privacy, Affordability, and Efficiency
“A level 5 car should drive like a human, and a level 5 robot vacuum should clean like a human,” Nariyawala says. To that end, Matic has five RBG cameras on all sides of its body. Rather than using lidar, gyroscopes, or infrared sensors to navigate your home, Matic sees like a human being and builds maps of the area on the fly. I watched on Nariyawala’s iPad as Matic built a map of obstacles in the WIRED offices, which included my feet moving from side to side as I shuffled around the room.
Future iterations will include gesture-based navigation. Ideally, Matic will be able to clean continuously and you will be able to visually indicate that you want it to clean under the kitchen table and then go to the trash can to be emptied. This feature wasn’t yet working when we tested it.
Matic is Wi-Fi-enabled, but data will be stored locally. Map information is streamed directly from the app to the robot over your local Wi-Fi network. All the mapping data and analysis will be confined to your devices, which should help keep the information about your house more secure.
The version of Matic that will ship in March 2024 will include the Nvidia Jetson Orin chip, which is designed to support automation and AI robotics, and will hopefully allow the vacuum to incorporate machine intelligence as it learns to clean your home without your help. “A robot and a human should be able to read and use the same map,” Nariyawala says. When human beings have a mental map, they can engage in natural conversation with it—if you give a human directions to the public library, it should be able to find its way. Matic will do the same thing.
The prototype Matic did not have the new chip, but it cleaned remarkably well. I laid out several tests for it, far beyond the magnitude of what it might face in my own home—a truly horrifying jumble of baby food, Froot Loops, and Orbeez that made Nariyawala visibly nervous. I also walked around in front of it and waved my hands in front of its “face” to simulate little kids interfering with its operations, but it blithely evaded and ignored me.
Aside from the hiccup when Matic couldn’t tell that different colors of concrete were neither carpet nor hardwood, it filled the trash bag to capacity with a surprising amount of debris. The wet baby food was immediately absorbed, ready to be disposed of.
In my years of testing robot vacuums, I’ve accepted that various common problems will just be part of the experience. Of course there will be regular maintenance issues. (Matic offers a monthly $15 monthly maintenance membership which will offer refills on HEPA bags, mop rolls, and brush rolls.) Of course you’ll have to empty dirty bins and poke through self-emptying chutes with your fingers (yuck). Of course you’ll have to operate it through an app that only you will have on your phone, and then of course your spouse will regularly call you as you’re trying to live your life because they lost the vacuum again. Matic aims to solve all these through an almost complete redesign.
The Matic comes with a $1,800 price tag, and while that may seem exorbitant, it’s not much more than many of the high-end multifunctional cleaning robots currently on the market. From my early peek at what that money gets you, I’m excited to let this guy roam around my home.
