DJI’s first robot vacuum launches in Europe, but the Romo won’t be a Roborock rival yet

• DJI’s New Romo Vacuum Uses AI-Driven Vision and Decision-Making for Home Cleaning
• The robot uses drone-grade sensors and real-time path planning to adapt to each room
• Romo’s high price and limited smart home integration could prevent it from dethroning Roborock globally.

DJI, a company known for putting autonomous flying machines in the sky, is now pointing its AI at the mess in your home. The company’s first line of robot vacuums, Romo, is officially rolling out in Europe this week – although these are selected markets for now, with no shared timeline for the UK. And while it’s marketed as a premium cleaning device, it also shows how DJI is working to bring AI-based tools to the ground as well as the sky.

The three Romo models, S, A, and P, range from $1,299 to $1,899 and include features you’d expect from a high-end robot cleaner, like a self-draining base, obstacle detection, cleaning and deodorizing capabilities, and almost-scary levels of suction. But it’s arguably the intelligence under the hood that defines the Romos, especially the kind derived from DJI’s years of work in drone navigation.

The Romo’s machine learning features allow it to mimic the kind of adaptation and planning needed to clean a house. The software learns the layout of a house as it moves through it, observing with two fisheye vision sensors and solid-state LiDARs, aided by edge-aware depth algorithms. This means it can predict collisions in advance and avoid them by recognizing obstacles ranging from uneven furniture and cables to pieces of dog food.

It’s not difficult to connect the dots of DJI’s drone technology in a vacuum. Making split-second decisions in unstable and rapidly changing environments is what autonomous drones must do all the time. It’s probably easier to avoid a playing card than it is to avoid a small bird moving through the air.