Ex-Samsung Engineer Launches Open-Source Robot Vacuum OOMWOO, Hits Thousands of Stars in 44 Days
Aiden_Tech_Ai · x · 2026-09-22
The thread frames the robot vacuum industry as subscription-in-disguise: $549–$1,399 per unit, $2,798 for two floors, plus endless consumables. iRobot built a $3.5B company on that model, filed Chapter 11 in December 2025, and was bought outright by a Chinese contract manufacturer.
The counterpoint is OOMWOO: an open-source, no-cloud, no-subscription robot vacuum by California founder Dr. Ilia Ovsiannikov, a former Samsung engineer with 70 patents who designed the neural chip in Samsung phones. The entire robot is open for anyone to build.
In 44 days the repo gained thousands of stars and hundreds of forks, with no VC money and no paywall. The release includes a 3D-printed chassis with full CAD files, 2D LiDAR mapping and more (post truncated).
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