Show HN: We built a camera only robot vacuum for less than 300$ (Well almost) (indraneelpatil.github.io)

The post describes how the authors built a mostly autonomous robot vacuum under a tight budget by streaming camera images to a laptop for inference, collecting teleoperated image–action data, and training a small CNN with behavior cloning to drive navigation. They report mixed results, including reversing/oscillation and difficulty learning when there is free space ahead, and note that their dataset may lack the right signals. The robot ultimately costs around $300 but still isn’t fully autonomous, requiring supervision and lacking autonomous charging.