Totally agree, with all this attention to "smart devices" in recent years I wonder where my consumer-sized flying de-duster mini-drone or something like that is? Sure the floor's sorted even with a 100%-non-smart robo-vac (and thusly, a flyer could just wipe or blow the dust down to the ground instead of any complicated gathering acrobatics), but the ground's just approx. half of dust-prone surface area..
I think the problem is largely determining “dustiness” of a given space, and cleaning it appropriately. Humans are good at arbitrary judgements like “this is dusty”.
It suffers the same kinds of problems as robotic pooper-scoopers, and even self-driving cars.
Would you solve with compressed air or a motorized feather duster?
> I think the problem is largely determining “dustiness” of a given space, and cleaning it appropriately.
Not needed. Like a robo-vac running frequently: they don't pick up _every_ single grain of dust perfectly during one given run. You just run them often enough they keep the floor "undusty enough". Or trimming beard / head at x mm every y days, not every hair is a perfect x mm at all times but the repetition / constancy makes it close enough.
> Would you solve with compressed air or a motorized feather duster?
Intuitively, probably the latter?.. But engineers working on such a thing would probably be best off prototyping and validating in both directions and with endless parameterizations =)