Though it is pretty wild they chose a vacuum bot lol.
In engineering school we created a robot that does specific tasks for a contest. It was a lot of work, but that was the main goal. Using an existing device that already has a LIDAR (and probably SLAM) sounds like a very smart move to me, for a project where you want to focus on other problems that have no existing solution yet.
Haha right xD
Actually I just recently bought it because I finally want to read it. I’ll see if I like it…