Oomwoo is a robot vacuum you 3D print yourself, and it never touches the cloud

Most robot vacuums phone home constantly, mapping your house and sending that data to a company's servers somewhere. Oomwoo, a new open-source project, does the opposite entirely. You 3D print the chassis yourself, drop in a Raspberry Pi and a 2D LiDAR sensor, and the whole thing runs offline using ROS 2 and the Nav2 navigation stack.

It integrates natively with Home Assistant, which will matter a lot to the smart-home crowd already running local-only setups for cameras and sensors. There's no companion app phoning a Chinese or American server, no cloud subscription, and no risk of the manufacturer bricking your vacuum in a future firmware update.

The trade-off is obvious

You need a 3D printer, a Raspberry Pi, and enough patience to source and assemble the LiDAR module and drive components yourself. This isn't a Shark or iRobot replacement for someone who wants to unbox a vacuum and press start. It's a maker project first, a vacuum second. Commercial robot vacuums like the DJI ROMO, which borrows navigation tech from DJI's drone business, will out-clean it on raw suction and mapping polish.

Should you care?

If you already own a 3D printer and a spare Raspberry Pi, and privacy concerns about cloud-connected home robots bother you, this is a genuinely interesting weekend project. If you just want a vacuum that works out of the box, stick with a commercial model, oomwoo isn't trying to compete there.