Robotic vacuums like the Roomba have made it easy for even the laziest people to keep their floors clean. Now, Roomba maker iRobot Corp. has found another use for the little robots: building maps for other smart home devices.

Some of the smarter Roomba models build maps of your home to make their cleaning paths more efficient. Over time, they learn the locations of walls, doorways, lamps, furniture and so on, which eventually allows them to clean a home without bumping into things over and over.

The idea behind this mapping system is to reduce the time it takes for a Roomba to finish its job, but iRobot Chief Executive Colin Angle said the mapping data is useful for more than just speeding up the vacuum. “There’s an entire ecosystem of things and services that the smart home can deliver once you have a rich map of the home that the user has allowed to be shared,” Angle told Reuters.

According to Angle, iRobot could soon make a deal to sell Roomba’s mapping data to one or more of the big tech companies currently pushing smart devices, including Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Google Inc. parent Alphabet Inc. In fact, iRobot already made a deal in March to integrate Roomba with Amazon’s voice assistant, Alexa, and the robo-vacuums already work with Google Home. The company also plans on adding support for Apple Home Pod sometime in the near future.

Roomba’s mapping data could open up a number of possibilities for smart home devices, as the robotic vacuum would essentially act like a mobile sensor. For example, the data could improve sound quality for smart speakers like Amazon Echo, or it could allow smart air conditioners to better control airflow depending on furniture placement. If iRobot’s idea takes off, the company could even add other sensors to Roomba in the future that could gather useful data such as lighting conditions and humidity.

iRobot’s plans raise a few privacy concerns, but Angle said the company would not sell home mapping data without users’ permission. However, he also believes that given the choice, most people would be willing to share the data if it would make their smart home devices work better. It is not clear whether Roomba’s map sharing plan would be an opt-in or an opt-out feature.

Photo: iRobot