The Matic is our favorite robot vacuum and robo-mop, and it’s also now the first to escape the FCC’s Roomba ban.
Well, sort of — because the Matic wasn’t banned to begin with.
Here’s what’s actually happening: On October 2nd, the FCC added the original Matic, model 4MA0001, and its charging dock model 4DK0008 to its ban waiver list. That allows the FCC to approve these radio products for import, marketing, and sale.
But the Matic doesn’t need a waiver, because its radios were already approved years ago. The FCC’s foreign drone, robot, and router bans only keep future products from getting imported into the United States, not existing ones whose radios have already been approved.
Besides, Matic’s products don’t get FCC approval to begin with — instead, Matic ships them with an off-the-shelf Intel AX210 Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip that gets its own approval from the FCC. (It’s the same kind of Wi-Fi card you’ll find inside a desktop or laptop computer.) Matic also doesn’t need to worry about an import ban specifically, because Matic assembles its robots right here in Mountain View, California.
A waiver could theoretically help if Matic were to build new products outside the United States and try to import them here, except that the FCC hasn’t granted Matic a blanket approval on a brand of robot, like it did with Asus and Netgear’s routers. Instead, it specifically granted a waiver for the Matic models 4MA0001 and 4DK0008, which, again, have already made it through the FCC.
The waiver might not be completely symbolic. The FCC is currently trying to close lots of the loopholes that currently make its ban impotent, is weighing whether to make manufacturers disclose all the components in their gadgets, and is retroactively cracking down on some companies it sees as flaunting the rules. While Matic assembles its robots in the US, it admits it doesn’t yet source 65 percent of its components from US suppliers, the threshold for it to be seen as Made in the US, and perhaps one of those foreign components could trip it up if not for the waiver.
Even so, Matic already gets its “core compute platform” from Nvidia, co-founder and CEO Mehul Nariyawala tells The Verge, and sources other “critical components” from US companies “whenever possible.”
And unlike some of the other companies where the FCC has mysteriously granted a waiver, Matic is committing to more US manufacturing and onshoring.
“Up till 3 months ago, both our R&D offices and production facilities were in the same office in Mountain View, about 24,000 square feet,” Nariyawala tells The Verge. “We’ve turned that entire facility into production facility and moved our office to Menlo Park.”
He says Matic went from shipping 1,500 robots a year ago to 17,000 now, and is trying to find more and more US suppliers so it can use even fewer foreign parts.
“At the moment we might be the only floor cleaning robot built in America,” he says. “That is becoming one of the key value propositions for our product.”