That Robot vacuum cleaner (SR8980) was €700 when it came out in 2013, my BluMill MT-710 looks precisely the same
as this Samsung SR8980 Robot vacuum cleaner on the underside, mine even has Mopping function and Water tank with
2 mops, but my cost €159 and does the same or more, and works great on my carpet , it's never been that clean 🙂.

BTW, my debris reservoir, is much larger then this Samsung SR8980, and is 600ml.

Hey Dave, you should totally do some Soviet tech tear downs to checkout how their tech differed over the years, I think that would be super interesting with your insight into western tech.

I for one welcome our robot overlords, I'm looking forward to them doing my house work, but I won't hold my breath.

Cool, but can you play Doom on it?

Daves giving the robot the hammer…

It is interesting to compare this to my old Roomba. Overall very similar but I saw some differences:
1 – On the Roomba the suction is from a fan within the removable dust collector, so the fan has clean air running through it.
2 – The Roomba monitors the front idler wheel for motion. The wheel is half black and half white and an optical sensor can detect it rotating. I can always tell this wheel is clogged with lint as the vacuum will move a few feet, turn, move a few feet, turn, and so on rather than trying to go in long runs.
3 – The Roomba has a sort of mechanical torque detector on the motor that runs the main brushes, I assume to detect that they are getting too clogged. I'm not sure why they don't just monitor the current draw…
4 – The Roomba only has one edging brush. I assume it only follows walls in one direction.

The main drawback for is is that some members of our household have long hair and it is frequently necessary to open up the brush cage and remove the hair wrapped around the brush.

What is the big square chip over there? It must be some CPU/SoC.

Wow, I just tore one of these down myself. Mine was a kerbside special/road kill from some renters dumping their junk and doing a runner. It came with a dust exaction/charging station that I left behind. Mine didn't have the USB port, just 4 solder pads for one. I was kind of interested to see if you would have found the hidden screws, but no, brutalized like mine. I was most surprised to see a camera – the things spying on us was my first thought – remember all the carry on with the Samsung TV camera's – not good.
I powered up the main vacuum motor, it squealed quite badly from lack of lubrication, probably why it got dumped. So I added some oil, but boy is that a weak air pump, the exact opposite of many 240V mains vacuum's that have a one kilowatt or more motor, and pump out insane levels of heat in the process. It kind of made me wonder how this thing ever worked with suck a low powered pump. Sure it cannot be that powerful as it is battery powered, however I thought it was a bit of a joke.

One day we humans will be drinking our morning drink. The floor sweeper will roll up and speak in the voice of the dalek and say 'Exterminate!' They currently have no weapons, but they have discovered they can fly by reversing the vacuum motor.