I worked on this product back in 2002-2005. I developed the initial wheel system for this form factor of product and early prototypes of their digital motor once we realised we'd need a very high power density compressor motor. Sadly the battery technology has taken a long time to get to the point where it can now give a useable run time, even when the vacuum only consumes 100W. Also the prices of other components, h…
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) essentially refers to various algorithms to determine egomotion (how much a robot moves in an environment) using sensors, while building a map at the same time. Essentially, at each time step, the algorithm senses its environment and checks how much it differs from the previous time step, and figures out if it saw any new features to add to the map and how much the correla…
The reason we went with a single camera is lack of space. As you can see from some of the imagery of the product, the camera stack is a huge proportion of the machine. Also when the algorithms were being developed in the early 2000's cameras were still expensive bits of kit. I seem to remember the first one being 1024x1024 resolution, pretty poor for photography, but good enough for feature mapping with SLAM.