Oomwoo: a fully open, local-first robot vacuum you 3D-print and build yourself

A maker known for the Maker’s Pet projects has launched oomwoo, a build-in-public effort to create a robot vacuum whose hardware, firmware, and software are all open from the first commit. It runs entirely on-device — mapping a home with an inexpensive 2D LiDAR and navigating via ROS 2 and Nav2 on a Raspberry Pi 5 (with an ESP32 running micro-ROS still under consideration) — and integrates directly with Home Assistant for local control. The pitch is deliberately anti-cloud: no vendor lock-in, no mandatory account, and a chassis you print and can fully understand. Optional cloud features and an eventual app store of ROS 2 behaviors would layer on top, but the core is meant to work offline out of the box.

The project is admittedly early. Its v0 milestone is a bare-bones working build: a printed chassis, a Gazebo simulation, LiDAR with manual SLAM, and undecided final compute architecture. Deliverables in progress include a full bill of materials, printable files, ROS 2 packages, firmware, a custom motor-driver and sensor PCB, and build-and-troubleshooting documentation. Work is split into self-contained modules — simulation, coverage cleaning, dust bin, fan assembly — so contributors can each grab a piece and submit pull requests, with the best implementations winning out over time. The creator targets a roughly $100–$200 build cost (plus the Pi) to rival a $500–$600 commercial unit, largely by sourcing motors and sensors from AliExpress and printing the enclosure.

For a security- and privacy-minded audience, the significance is less about vacuuming than about ownership: a home robot that maps the interior of your house without shipping that data to a manufacturer’s servers. Commenters raised retrofitting existing vacuums, self-emptying docks, and prior art like the Valetudo project, which achieves cloud-free operation by reverse-engineering commercial units. One notable piece of feedback — that heavy LLM-generated text in the design docs eroded trust — the maker acknowledged. It’s a real project rather than a finished product, but the open BOM and modular structure make it a credible template for local-first home robotics.