57: A robot vacuum cleaner with a vision-based solution? Are you kidding me?

"Is it done?"

Zhang Feng, wearing a mask, shouted into the walkie-talkie.

"Minister Zhang, we've finished throwing it all out."

There were various echoes in the factory building, but the voices sounded quite young.

"Install the sensors; President Chen will be heading in shortly."

After putting on a mask and shoe covers, Chen Chen also walked into this trash-filled room. Today was the experiment for the sweeping robot, primarily testing its path-planning capabilities and cleaning thoroughness.

A sweeping robot is simple in a way—it's essentially just a mobile vacuum cleaner. However, to make it intelligent, one needs to add various sensors, smart chip algorithms, and so on.

"What are these spheres?"

Chen Chen pointed at various fist-sized spheres mounted on the wall. These spheres had smooth surfaces and were constantly rotating.

"These are the sensors and positioning devices for our robot. They can sense the surrounding temperature and humidity. You can think of them as small radars that scan the environment and transmit signals to the sweeping robot."

Listening to the person-in-charge's explanation, Chen Chen became even more confused. The first sweeping robot he used in his previous life didn't have these devices; it was just a disc-shaped robot with a rotating radar on top and a collision sensor at the front.

Suppressing his curiosity, he prepared to see what this experiment was all about.

The person-in-charge, Li Lei, brought over a sweeping robot and opened his phone to start it.

He pressed the switch on top of the sweeping robot, and then a voice announcement began.

(Censored...)

"It's finally over. Manager Li, did you find the cause of the malfunction just now?"

Chen Chen asked.

Li Lei shook his head upon hearing this.

"Let's head out first."

"Manager Li, why was this sweeping robot made this way? Isn't one sensor or radar on top of the robot enough? Why place so many sensors?"

Facing Chen Chen's question, Li Lei first carried a machine over from the side before speaking:

"It's like this, President Chen. Our ordinary robots have already been developed and tested. The one we're testing today is our visual-based solution, which doesn't rely on radar or infrared but performs pure vision-based cleaning."

"But because the processor's performance isn't enough to calculate such a large amount of data, performing modeling and mapping would overload the processor. That's why we added several sensors to assist with modeling and positioning. We also plan to add a robotic arm to this Stone to handle larger pieces of trash."

Chen Chen was stunned after hearing Li Lei's explanation.

Wait, they're playing with something this advanced?

Pure vision-based cleaning? A sweeping robot trying to use a pure vision-based solution?

Isn't this one of the autonomous driving solutions for electric vehicles from my previous life?

"Um, Manager Li, isn't it a bit too early for this? I think there's a problem with your thinking. Why develop technologies that aren't needed at all?"

"I'm not saying the technology is useless, but rather that it's not very useful when applied to a sweeping robot. This product just needs to do a good job of cleaning. Even if you upgrade it, you could focus on essential aspects like integrated sweeping and mopping, cleaning, spraying water, and mopping."

"President Chen, I feel this is the future trend, so I..."

"This is indeed a very impressive technology, but we can't handle it right now. You guys should just focus on the sweeping robot. By the way, it's already June; can you make it in time for the September launch event?"

"No problem!"

Before Li Lei could answer, Zhang Feng, who was standing nearby, cut in.

"Not just the sweeping robot, our air purifier can also keep up with the schedule, though the smart band might be a bit slower."

"It's okay if the smart band is slow. At worst, we'll just release a PPT first and wait until mass production to start selling it."

Chen Chen was quite an expert at this; in his previous life, there were so many 'PPT phones' and 'PPT products'—everyone did it.

Not to mention Boss Jia, who dared to hold a press conference with just two pictures before mass production. Besides, it wasn't that he didn't have a product; he just had to wait a bit after the launch.

Chen Chen left Stone satisfied, taking a few bewildered Engineers with him.

He took several vision Engineers from Stone with him, planning to put them in the network camera team for further training, then move them to the automotive algorithm department once the car division was established.

He had found a treasure.

Counting them up, there were quite a few products to be launched in the second half of the year: the smart band, TV, air purifier, sweeping robot, plus the shining note series, digital series, and Kunpeng series. One launch event might not even be enough to cover them all.

How about we follow suit and split it into two?

A first half and a second half?

While Chen Chen was happily returning, he had no idea that the owner of a small factory in Zhucheng was so angry he had already smashed several phones.