Your robot vacuum draws a floor plan of your home — and where that map goes

A current model goes round the house once and draws a floor plan. It has to, in order to tell rooms apart and avoid furniture. That picture you have seen in the app is it.

That picture sets the character of the device. Where a camera leaves footage, a robot vacuum leaves layout.

What is in that one map

Floor plan sounds abstract. Spelled out, it is this.

• How many rooms there are and how big each one is
• Where the furniture sits, and so how the place is used
• Thresholds and corridors, which is to say the lines people walk
• The times you run it, which is to say the hours the house is empty

That last line is the same kind of information a thermostat holds. A living pattern.

The first three are a little different. Room count, floor area and furniture layout are exactly the shape that furniture and appliance advertising wants to buy. That is where this device parts company with the rest of the house.

Where does the map live

	On the device only	On company servers too
Seeing the map in the app	Sometimes only on the same network	Works from anywhere
Room names and no-go zones	The device remembers	They follow the account
If you replace the device	It redraws	It carries over
If the service ends	Cleaning carries on	Map features can stop
Can the company see it	No	Structurally, yes

Most products are the right hand column, because controlling it from outside is built on that. Products that run on the left alone exist, but they do less, and product pages do not say so loudly.

Models with a camera

More products now carry a front camera to recognise obstacles — the feature that dodges socks and cables.

One thing to check here. Is that video processed on the device, or does it go up? And if it goes up, do people look at it?

In 2022, photographs taken by Roomba test units circulated outside the company. These were development units rather than retail products, and the participants had agreed to the data collection. The images went to outsourced workers cleaning up training data, and that is where they got out.

Reading that as “robot vacuums photograph your house and leak it” overstates it. Read precisely, it says this. Once video leaves the device, what happens next depends on the maker’s outsourcing arrangements. Those are not on the product page.

Check before you buy

What to check	Why
Is there a device-only map mode	Without one, the floor plan lives in an account
Is there a camera	If so, where the video is processed follows
Does it work without a cloud account	Whether basic cleaning survives is the question
Can you delete the map	You need this when you move or sell it
What happens if the service ends	Maps and schedules stop first
What drops out if you turn off data sharing	Usually automatic room recognition

Once you have one

• Delete the map once and let it redraw. The map from the first test run holds the state of the place before you tidied
• No-go zones are a privacy tool as well. Exclude a study or a workroom and that much less gets drawn
• Put it on the guest network. It has no reason to see anything else in the house
• In settings, find diagnostic data sharing and improvement programme and switch them off. On a camera model there is a separate video contribution consent

In short

Question	Answer
What this device collects	Not dust. The layout of your home
Why the map is sensitive	Room count, floor area and furniture sit in one picture
Where is the map	Usually company servers. Device-only products are rare
On a camera model	Whether video leaves the device, and whether people look
The 2022 Roomba case	Test units, not retail. The lesson is about outsourcing
Once you have one	Redraw the map, set no-go zones, guest network, sharing off

Every product picks up dust — what separates them is the map they draw, and that is not on the spec sheet.