A robot-vacuum sensor maker goes public as the US blocks new foreign-built robots
Eight weeks after the US changed the rules for foreign-built robots, a supplier to robot-vacuum makers is selling shares. What changes for the vacuum you buy next?
The laser that steers a robot vacuum around your sofa doesn’t always come from the company whose name is on the lid. Shenzhen Camsense Technologies builds those sensors for vacuum makers, and on September 22 it opened a Hong Kong share offering to raise about US$87 million, with trading due to begin September 30.
Robot vacuums are nearly the whole business. Camsense makes LiDAR, the spinning laser that maps a room, along with line-laser sensors that spot obstacles, and products for robot vacuums account for more than 98 percent of its revenue.
If you live in the US, the share sale is the smaller half of this story. On July 28 the FCC added foreign-produced advanced robotic devices to its Covered List. A new model on that list generally can’t get the authorization it needs to be imported or sold here.
Does the rule reach your vacuum?
Hold your own vacuum up against the definition behind the list. A covered machine gets around on the ground by itself, weighs more than 4.4 pounds together with its dock, and carries three things: a sensor that perceives its surroundings, a network connection and software that steers it.
A typical app-connected robot vacuum fits every line. A basic model with no wireless connection at all misses one. Coverage of the listing read the rule the same way, describing the covered devices as “including robotic vacuum cleaners.”
The brand on the lid doesn’t settle it either. The list goes by where a machine is built, whoever builds it. Even a robot assembled in the US counts as foreign-produced unless more than 65 percent of its component cost is domestic, and every imported sensor pulls that share down.
What happens, then, to the robot vacuum you already own? Under this rule, nothing. It keeps working, and a waiver lets it go on receiving basic software and firmware updates. A model that already holds FCC authorization can still be imported and sold, so the machines on store shelves today can stay on sale.
Camsense’s co-founder, Zhou Kun, puts his company’s risk on models still being designed. “The export and procurement for our existing client products remain normal, with potential disruption limited to new product development schedules,” he told a Hong Kong newspaper. Orders and research, he added, “remain unaffected.”
The sensors themselves are one step removed from the rule. What needs US authorization is the finished robot, so the exposure sits with the brands that build Camsense parts into their machines. Coverage of the listing names none of those brands, and gives no figure for how much of Camsense’s revenue ends up in vacuums sold in the US.
So the sensors keep shipping, and the vacuum in your living room keeps running. The rule waits further along, on the day a maker finishes a new model built abroad around a sensor like Camsense’s and asks the FCC to let it in. Without a conditional approval from the Department of War, that model stays out of US stores.
