Your Roomba Will Soon Be Able to Find Your Home's Wi-Fi Dead Zones

You may have noticed that your Wi-Fi doesn’t work equally across your whole home. Maybe your bedroom is across the house from your router, and you just can’t manage to get Netflix to work there. You may not know exactly where the dead spots are, though. Soon, your Roomba could help. According to The Verge, a forthcoming update to the iRobot app will map your home’s Wi-Fi strength as the Roomba moves throughout your house, allowing you to figure out where the signal cuts out.

Even if you already know that your Wi-Fi is spotty in certain parts of your house, the Wi-Fi map would show just where those dead spots are and the extent of the problem. Armed with more knowledge of your apartment’s signal issues, you could figure out a better place to put your router or know when you really need to buy a range extender.

Don’t expect to see the feature pop up on your app immediately, though. Though it should roll out in mid-January, it will only apply to a small subset of users of the company’s high-end vacuums, the Roomba 960 and the Roomba 980. Those vacuums, which have Wi-Fi, already create a map of where they’ve cleaned that you can access in the app, so it’s not a huge leap for them to show where they experience shoddy internet connectivity. The function will be in beta testing for a while, and only a few hundred users who request access will be enrolled in the program at first.

Should it be a success, though, you can expect to see Wi-Fi mapping on the company’s next generation of vacuums, and depending on its popularity, it could be a functionality other robot vacuum manufacturers begin incorporating, too.