The trick is to make a robot that has a Lidar and a camera, then train a model that can replace the Lidar.

(Lidar can of course also be echolocation).

Yeah this would help a lot to collect good trainable data, teleoperating the robot around and collecting large amount of good data is quite hard

The harder trick is to do it cost effectively. I picked up my Roborock for $200 and it has LiDAR. Works really well.

200$ is insane, sounds like economies of scale is really working for them

I don’t follow models and there are a ton of them. Here is an example $280 version with lidar.

https://a.co/d/0cuCgBSZ

I thought the trick is just to use an xbox kinect. But lidar got a lot cheaper in the recent years.