Graph Search on Your Floor: How Robot Vacuums Use Pathfinding Algorithms

I have been writing about shortest-path algorithms and A* heuristics in the context of road networks and pgRouting. But the same graph search concepts show up in a device that millions of people own and never think twice about: the robot vacuum. A robot vacuum has to solve three problems every time it runs. It needs to figure out where it is, decide where to clean next, and find its way back to…