--- title: (RoboVac) Building a home robot to autonomously clean... description: Two engineers built a DIY robot vacuum cleaner for under $300 using off-the-shelf hardware and a behavior cloning approach for autonomous navigation. They... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/robovac-building-a-home-robot-to-autonomously-clean-our-house-mw8wzfzpl twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: (RoboVac) Building a home robot to autonomously clean our house | daily.dev og:description: Two engineers built a DIY robot vacuum cleaner for under $300 using off-the-shelf hardware and a behavior cloning approach for autonomous navigation. They... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/robovac-building-a-home-robot-to-autonomously-clean-our-house-mw8wzfzpl og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/mw8wZFZPL.png og:image:alt: (RoboVac) Building a home robot to autonomously clean our house og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # (RoboVac) Building a home robot to autonomously clean our house **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 5 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Two engineers built a DIY robot vacuum cleaner for under $300 using off-the-shelf hardware and a behavior cloning approach for autonomous navigation. They teleoperated the robot to collect image-action training pairs, then trained a CNN to replicate those navigation decisions. The model struggled with key tasks like detecting free space and handling rotational commands, largely due to insufficient signal in the dataset. Experiments with data augmentation and ImageNet pre-training confirmed the issue was data quality rather than overfitting. The project took about 4 months part-time and identified clear areas for improvement: better data collection, adding temporal context via frame history, and stronger vacuum hardware. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Robots Are Hard](https://daily.dev/posts/robots-are-hard-22ujdpgoh) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Open Source Vacuum Avoids Cloud](https://daily.dev/posts/open-source-vacuum-avoids-cloud-7egqmipu3) · Hackaday · 104 upvotes · 8 comments --- Tags: [#deep-learning](https://daily.dev/tags/deep-learning), [#robotics](https://daily.dev/tags/robotics), [#pytorch](https://daily.dev/tags/pytorch) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/robovac-building-a-home-robot-to-autonomously-clean-our-house-mw8wzfzpl) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"(RoboVac) Building a home robot to autonomously clean our house","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/robovac-building-a-home-robot-to-autonomously-clean-our-house-mw8wzfzpl","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/robovac-building-a-home-robot-to-autonomously-clean-our-house-mw8wzfzpl"},"datePublished":"2026-04-08T17:03:03.549Z","dateModified":"2026-04-08T17:03:28.526Z","description":"Two engineers built a DIY robot vacuum cleaner for under $300 using off-the-shelf hardware and a behavior cloning approach for autonomous navigation. 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