It’s not that it’s impossible, but it requires effort, skill, and time. Instead of hiring a bunch of programmers who would make it run on the device locally, you can just throw the same amount of money at Amazon and it will run whatever unoptimised version of the renderer you stole on some random Chinese forum. As a bonus, you got to enrich a multibillionaire and make a world slightly worse place, which is a second and third priority of every CEO after getting money.
It's not the navigation that requires the server but the processing of the mapping data.
Which in itself is BS because most of these vacuums come with hardware roughly equivalent of a top of the line smartphone from about 5-6 years ago. They can easily do the raw data to map conversion, even if it's a bit slow and takes 20-30 seconds.
Also if you read the article it specifies that the damn thing is already running Google Cartographer which is a SLAM 3D map builder software - one of the better pro-grade mapping software suites, mind you. So the whole claim of cloud needed for processing is BS.
Nalivai@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
brsrklf@jlai.lu 23 hours ago
My VR headset can create pretty accurate 3D maps of my environment like nothing, and it only uses cameras to do so, so I can imagine it’s doable.
Then, yeah, it doesn’t “make sense” for that thing to externalize that.