Hacker News: indraneelpatil

New comment by indraneelpatil in "Show HN: We built a camera only robot vacuum for less than 300$ (Well almost)"

indraneelpatil — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:29:59 +0000

Apart from just detecting obstacles, we wanted to build a robot which is intelligent enough to take in semantic cues like this is a doorway so I can go through it, or this is a kitchen I can clean it this way and so on

New comment by indraneelpatil in "Show HN: We built a camera only robot vacuum for less than 300$ (Well almost)"

indraneelpatil — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:22:55 +0000

Damn thats very cool! Thanks for sharing! I guess we would only need to detect dust somehow which believe it or not is really hard, the camera isnt great quality but I guess this could work for slightly larger debris?

New comment by indraneelpatil in "Show HN: We built a camera only robot vacuum for less than 300$ (Well almost)"

indraneelpatil — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:18:56 +0000

Thanks! Its probably both, too little train data and insufficient quality.

Thats a cool idea, is there any VLM you would suggest? I can think of Gemini maybe? Or any would do?

New comment by indraneelpatil in "Show HN: We built a camera only robot vacuum for less than 300$ (Well almost)"

indraneelpatil — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:15:37 +0000

Yeah agreed 100%, might also need to factor in the cost of the charging dock but the overall thesis is still sound.

Do you know any cheap wifi MCU with a little ML accelerator that we can buy off the shelf? The only one we could think of was the Jetson Orin Nano and thats not cheap

New comment by indraneelpatil in "Show HN: We built a camera only robot vacuum for less than 300$ (Well almost)"

indraneelpatil — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:13:02 +0000

Yeah this would help a lot to collect good trainable data, teleoperating the robot around and collecting large amount of good data is quite hard

New comment by indraneelpatil in "Show HN: We built a camera only robot vacuum for less than 300$ (Well almost)"

indraneelpatil — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:11:29 +0000

200$ is insane, sounds like economies of scale is really working for them

New comment by indraneelpatil in "Show HN: We built a camera only robot vacuum for less than 300$ (Well almost)"

indraneelpatil — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:07:31 +0000

Thank you! We'll check it out! Yeah building a map might be the way to go. With E2E its quite hard to ensure "intelligent" cleaning

New comment by indraneelpatil in "Show HN: We built a camera only robot vacuum for less than 300$ (Well almost)"

indraneelpatil — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:02:45 +0000

Thanks! Our main goal was to build a vacuum which understands semantics inside the house so that it can "clean the kitchen" or "clean the bedroom" so we wanted to do machine learning and since we were doing machine learning we were like why not try to do something E2E instead of first doing SLAM, optical flow etc..

Show HN: We built a camera only robot vacuum for less than 300$ (Well almost)

indraneelpatil — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 05:08:20 +0000

Article URL: https://indraneelpatil.github.io/blog/2026/robot-vacuum/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47657204

Points: 99

# Comments: 42