Additionally since it maps using Lidar it completes a complete cleaning of my living room + kitchen area in 22 minutes, whole house in under 40 minutes. That is with it covering literally every square inch of carpet & tile instead of going around in random patterns...
For example can you use them completely offline or do they 'need' to phone home to a remote server in order to work?
Enter Valetudo - everything is local, including a webinterface to control the bot - installation was pretty flawless, upgrades (one so far) as well.
Check their list of supported robots: https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html
Been thinking of getting one for a while now...
As others have said, suction isn't as good as a regular vacuum. But what makes it great is it can do its thing while I'm away. I'm quite lazy and hate vacuuming, so there's no way I'd do it manually more than once a week. But the bot does its thing daily, so my house is generally cleaner. It also has a rotating brush that makes the carpet much fluffier than the regular vacuum, and seems to be better at pulling out hair.
Navigation-wise it's not too bad. I have to remove wires, socks and similar from the floor, or it WILL get tangled. The only thing which is a bit stupid is that it doesn't seem to know its height, so it can sometimes get stuck under things. But I've put some 2 mm wood blocks under that shelf, and now everyone's happy.
Ours scuffs the skirting boards a little, but the house is much cleaner. Behind doors, the tops of skirting and difficult corners still need doing.
If you have small-ish kids, you end up vacuuming everyday one way or the other. A Roomba's a decent stand-in for that. When my kids aren't at home, I mostly get by with my stick vacuum. (There the battery-driven ones really are nice.) With the stick vacuum it doesn't tend to leave my cables and rugs in random places, which makes the daily non-kid-time vacuuming similar levels of effort.
I assume pets are a similar deal, though I'm not a pet person.
One thing that hadn't occurred to me before getting the Roomba is that it vacuums a lot of places I wouldn't regularly get to on my own (e.g. under the sofa), and there's some benefit of having a cleaning session frequently that gets to a lot of those places that are otherwise hard to reach. But again, with kids not at home, I run it about once a week.
I'm genuinely curious about the mopping ones since I don't mop often, and always like it when I do. ;-)
Also, my dog wanted to kill it.
The one upgrade that would be useful in retrospect is electronic fencing, but it isn't a big deal.
With that said, NEITHER are a replacement for a real vaccuum. I would only recommend them for wood floors to pick up pet hair and things like that. I'm really, realyy disappointed with how they work on carpet.
The xiomi is also a lot more powerful than my Shark.
If there's some vaccuum bot that can almost take the place of a real vaccuum on carpet please let me know because I don't vaccuum enough at all.
Unfortunately I also have halfway carpeted stairs and I need to get some sort of vaccuum that isn't miserable to use on stairs.. Please dont carpet stairs. I have a really nice Shark big vaccuum but its not fun to do stairs with it.
If that one famous vacuum-repairman AMA on Reddit is to be believed, even most home upright vacuums don't produce enough suction to properly clean carpet. No way they're gonna fit that much power in a little disc-shaped, quiet robot.
Roombas or similar things definitely can't keep a rug clean forever, but I think it's fair to say they'll make the times you need to get the heavy duty pet vac out less frequent.
I'll usually sweep our main hallway twice a day which is a nice two minute brain break from work. As someone with ADHD working these sorts of chores into a very frequent and regular schedule is important or nothing will ever happen.
My wife was positive we’d be vacuuming just as much, insisted it was just a novelty, but we went from pretty much daily to weekly manual with the bot running daily.
Probably obvious but we realized letting it run in the evening after dinner while we clean made the most sense. You wake up to a clean floor. Prior to that we had it running in the middle of the day while we worked. Effectively it never seemed quite as clean.
I definitely recommend getting one.
Doesn't really get stuck (only time was when it "found" a fallen t-shirt behind a cabinet).
They do clean well for me, as long as I do it regularly. If I don't do it for a week it needs a second pass. But how much you need depends on external factors. Literally external, like how much dust gets in from outside.
Mine handled carpets well. IME of course. I didn't had pets when I had carpets, but at least with wooden floors cat hair gets cleaned fine.
Only caveat is if you have levels in your house you have to bring it up and down stairs but that's not asking much.
Although I think trying to convince vendors they want less data seems a little naive. More likely they'll lock out work like this entirely to make sure the free floor maps of your house (and schedule, and pet presence, and...) keep coming.
If your Roomba is rooted, then can't you disable OTA updates to prevent them from doing this?
The robot sucked up cat sick then smeared it around the room.
Cleaning everything seems a reasonable thing to do.
I'm thankful Amazon bought Roomba - one less reason to even consider them as an option considering all of the current gen vacs are sporting onboard cameras + CV (poop avoidance, is that really a huge concern?).
That is wild as that basically handles all the prep I have to do for mine. Albeit, 1000-1500 is quite a bit more.
There is a limit to raised carpets though from my understanding, I think anything over .5" (13mm) is too tall and it may not go onto it.
The one downside is having to clean the mopping pads since I didn't buy the 2x the price auto cleaning station.
With limited functionality they work of cause without app and cloud connection.
On a spin-off topic from this project: it says on his website
> The Apache-2.0 license is a very permissive license and a lot of work is being shared for free here, so I trust people to not take advantage of that and sell Valetudo; especially not as their own work. Please don’t disappoint me. Thank you.
I really don't understand why people pick licenses that specifically allow for things that they don't want to happen. It's specially baffling when the author is clearly aware of the limitation!
They also still sell vacuum and mopping* robots as seperate units which just drives up the cost. My old setup of the two robots took somewhere on the order of 5-6 hours to do a ~100m2 apartment.
I moved to a Roborock and then Dreame bot (someone really needs to talk to Xiaomi about all the sub-brands :P) comparitively, they both took around 1.5 to just under 2 hours to do a much better job.
I actually felt huge guilt selling my two iRobot's to someone, wanting to tell them they were complete junk and they were wasting their money.
*There is always mixed opinions on mopping effectiveness, but the iRobot roll-and-spit model of mopping is truly horrendous.
Why are there only mixed models and what are the benefits?
If I look at my place the ground floor is tiled and the top floor is all carpet.
That means I would need two vacuums anyway as they haven’t learned yet to climb stairs.
Why wouldn’t I want a vacuum only model for upstairs? For downstairs the universal model is great obviously. But upstairs?
The S6Max that has a tank, you can also remove (easily, two button clips) and it'll not attempt any mopping feature. It also supposedly doesn't squirt water on to the pad when it knows its on carpet, but at some stage you may be dragging a mildly damp cloth on to the carpet. (was never an issue for me, the pad was never that wet that you could reasonably detect it on the carpet)
Overall mopping with drag-behind pads is pretty... opportunistic? Its not great and you'll be in a position where you have to manually mop. Many models are switching to the spinning buffer pads which is a much better solution (that's the Dreame W10) but it refuses to do carpet. So its always a matter of finding a model that fits your use case.
>That means I would need two vacuums anyway as they haven’t learned yet to climb stairs.
Many allow for multi floor mapping on a single bot, but stairs will always be a problem for the Daleks. :P
On an almost weekly basis it would fail to start because it would think it was moved if something just moved a little bit nearby or a cat just happened to be sleeping nearby. This generally forced me to remap
Then it would constantly get lost and be confused about what room it was in. Seemingly for the same reasons of things moving around.
A home isn't a static environment and a camera just seems much more efficient. Not that a camera is perfect, but at least a camera can account for things moving around were lidar cannot.
Or was this a case of Neato just not being good? The lidar issues was why I went with iRobot. It was a worse vacuum but if it actually works consistently than I can just have it run more often.
Must've been Neatos implementation i suppose...
On top of the really top-notch LIDAR the S5 is beautifully engineered as well - basically everything is a module (i.e. wheel+motor) which is plugged in and secured with a few screws - really good repairability and also spares are available (needed so far: 1 LIDAR motor, 2,50€; 1 resettable fuse for charging).
Interesting that others handle this better. I had heard great things about Neato before so that's why I went it. But it just ended up being more frustrating and not worth it.
Guess I just had a really bad experience.
The engineering on the modularity is neat though, I agree.
No issues whatsoever - on the floor where there is no dock it just goes back to the point you dropped it off and started cleaning...
> Also, it always gets stuck on dryer rack.
Have you tried to put some magnetic tape (barrier) on to the legs?
I think this is a software issue with Neato. My previous bot was the cheapest Ecovacs with LiDAR and vacuum base station, and it could adapt to furniture movement, large boxes appearing and disappearing in the living room, etc without too much trouble.
LiDAR (on the Ecovacs bots) does struggle with mirrors and floor-to-ceiling windows. Even the X1 Omni is convinced there's another room "inside" the large mirror I have in the living room. It's okay though since I just draw a no-go zone or no-go lines on the map wherever there's something odd.
Really the best results will always use sensor fusion - LiDAR mapping + camera object avoidance + physical bump sensor seems to work pretty well on the Ecovacs bots. I love the improvement in cable and shoelace avoidance since upgrading to a model with vision.
Why do you say that, am I missing something? Surely both technologies are able to keep "looking" as the hoover moves around, the lidar ones surely aren't doing a single analysis and then not checking again?
The issue I was having with the neato is that is exactly what it was doing. It would come off its dock, do a scan around it. And if things were too different it would go back to its dock and complain that it has been moved.
So I had to find a place that things never moved, but that proved difficult. Even small things like the trash can shifting or books on a shelf shifting seem to throw it off.
I finally got to the point that I basically tricked it with blocking it from seeing certain things near its dock but that is less than ideal.
Now once it did that initial scan it seemed to be mostly ok, but it did seem too often get lost near my computer where the chair often moves. It would constantly tell me it was lost and I had to pick it up and put it back on the dock. Or my favorite was when it seemed to try to dock on the other side of my home.
My feeling (and has been confirmed by the iRobot) was that at least a camera with decent AI could account for a moving object vs most other things being the same. It is far from perfect, but compared to the Neato the camera has been leagues better.
I am very curious though how other Lidar system handle this since I would assume that there is a lack of data available to identify a change in environment vs a moved object.
But I believe lidar should be able to do the same as a camera in terms of real-time updates - from a tech point of view it's just a different type of sensor to a camera, there's no reason (other than difficulty/cost) why lidar robots can't be constantly scanning & understanding the difference between a chair that you've moved since 5 minutes earlier and a cat that keeps moving. Both camera and lidar products can be made dumb enough to fail badly, or smart enough to do a great job. After all, self driving cars have been demo'd using full lidar, it's not like that technology itself takes hours to image a room.
While cleaning, you can watch it on the map (in the cloud/app as well as when rooted on the local webserver) and can see it constantly scanning the surroundings and things appearing when they do.
I once saw an object "appearing" when there should've been none when i was out, when i got back home it was my cat that wanted to roadblock the Roborock, laying on the floor...
Beyond that, I've had it vacuum a floor twice. When it finished, it showed the space twice, because it became disoriented. Basically, it didn't just think the room changed shape, it thought it doubled in size!
I've had it get lost because it thought it was on the opposite side of a rectangular room from where it actually was.
They never update it to fix these things and, IMO, haven't shipped a truly new product in several years. I'm not shocked that a lot of other lidar-based products have surpassed them now.
Once my i7 has generated a proper map, it will will slow down when it approaches known walls, or even places where obstacles have been several times in the past. It will need to bump into the obsticle or wall to confirm its position though.
It does use a mostly predictable back and forth pattern, taking note of areas with walls/obstacles, and after the main sweeping it will combe back to go around the obstacles, and finally (optional) do a sweep of the walls. Then it moves onto the next room.
The system does have limitations. For example, if it needs assistance in the middle of a clean job, after you fix it, there is a reasonable chance that it will do dumb stuff afterwards, like missing a large section of floor. (It seems to even know this, but have problematic coding that prevents it from doing the right thing).
But yeah, I'd not call the mapping good, just acceptable.
There are other annoyances like the i7 battery being so small, especially since they have a giant battery compartment. Like seriously big enough like ni-cad batteries battery of equivalent capacity. But they only offer a slightly larger capacity battery as part of their Costco exclusive model, and try to lock out third party batteries. The net result is that even when brand new, it could not quite do a single floor of my house in one go, needing to go recharge for like 40 minutes before it could do the last 10 minutes of cleaning.
The app is not very good. It does not even do some basic things like prompt the user for regular maintenance periodically based on number of hours used.
The floor maps in the app are weird. For example, on one of my floors, the online map decided that the entrance to one of my rooms was on a completely different wall from where the entrance really was. It thought the actual door was just a wall. However the actually mapping data on the robot was just fine. It knew where the door really was, and never tried to drive though the wall where the online map though the door was.
I mean, yes, the first time, but my i7 takes like 2 hours to do my ~140sqm apartment?
It's not just "Murica first". If these were European companies, I'd jump ship very quickly to an iRobot competitor with a superior product, thanks to EU's data collection laws and USA's OK relationship with EU. But they aren't, they operate in a regime where questionable data collection is the norm and theft of IP is called "R&D".
Yes, Amazon will use iRobot to vacuum more data than dirt, but at least they are part of the US and EU laws. They provide gov services for a ton of US DoD/NASA infra! China could and would just thumb their nose at us without much concern.
I work in tech, often adjacent or on national projects or highly sensitive R&D. We have regular counter-espionage training.
You are concerned about domestic law enforcement learning about you. Both are valid threat models.
Let’s say it exfiltrates data that eventually allows a foreign competitor to build sophisticated metallurgy for turbines. It’s not like all foreign countries eagerly hire foreign talent, moreover it puts domestic expertise at risk as well as all the collateral subcontractors and suppliers… so, yeah, super metallurgy-guy's job may be secure (can get hired by the foreign competitor), even if the company collapses but not the jobs of 10,000s who work for suppliers, etc.
It seems your actual complaint is that if US Law Enforcement decides you are a target of interest, they would think to go to Amazon and Amazon's reputation is that they'd cooperate in handing over data, whereas the LE officers would neither bother to ask, nor expect cooperation from the Chinese companies.
The Chinese (or anyone) can certainly turn over their data to people who can arrest you, if they decide you are a target.
China and Amazon are both threats to privacy.
But so far I suppose the indigenous big tech spying apparatus has been effective enough to not need foreign operators help.
It is after all a personal decision and to each their own.
The bar for leveraging general information about a regular US citizen in the US by a company like Amazon or the US government is very, very low. One thing I see happening really soon (if not already) is such data being used by medical insurers to algorithmically decide your coverage and rates. Or for authorities to use to establish whatever pattern they want that can be damning even if circumstantial.
Looking around, all of this already happens in the US even without the help of an extra massive data collection net. From companies like Google or PayPal algorithmically locking you out of your critical digital identity, your paid services, your money with simply a boilerplate "sorry not sorry, don't let the door hit you on your way out", to authorities stealing all your neighbors' smart doorbell recordings to see what you have been doing and Stingraying the hell out of everyone on the off chance that they're going to catch the person they're looking for. Anything that makes that easier or opens up more avenues to do more of that is definitely going to be used (and abused) as such.
Well put.
I see the synergy with their Alexa, Echo etc.
I'm not sure if that is the answer to privacy concerns, but at least it is there.
When it comes to patents, I'm fine with that. Our system of patents has become a significant encumbrance to innovation and is causing US companies to fall behind.
I am not sure if Amazon is more trustworthy than that.
I guess you could say my threat model is not “the United States is my adversary”, and more that I appreciate some checks and balances being present on ‘local yokel’ police departments which are empirically not always doing the right thing (especially where oversight is low).
This is legal for the FBI. An illegal wiretap is not.
https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-ring-police-videos-securi...
I think that places in the US will start having to push for the right to turn off and disconnect (yeah, shades of Max Headroom here).
Responding to an inquiry from Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Amazon said in a letter dated July 1 that it has handed over private recordings to police 11 times in 2022. The company said it was complying with an "emergency request."
Don't you already have that in your pocket?
It's also user-serviceable.
Agree that the "data collection" aspect is muzzy, the same complaint would hold for any IC you attach to your network (hell, even the router itself).
Of course, this is a model I bought used almost ten years ago. Not sure how similar current models are.
I once had it give me an error that the main fan (for suction) was broken. In this case, there was a small particle lunged into it, so it wouldn't spin. All it took was a little wiggle, and it spun again.
It's definitely more than 10 phillips head screws, but less than 30. I guess it depends which part broke, but I had to disassemble pretty much the whole thing. I can promise you that my repair skills or experiences are very novice, but I managed just fine. Had two screws left over after putting it all back together as is tradition, but I suppose they weren't mission critical, as this was like 3 years back and Dobby is still cleaning like a champ.
Like half a year ago, the LIDAR broke. Ordered a new one on amazon for 20 bucks, unscrewed now about 28 screws and exchanged the broken part. Put it all together, again tossed away a screw that left me wondering where it belonged, and it still works to this day.
This was a very long way of saying "Roborocks repair fairly easily, and there are numerous tutorials online."
Edit: BTW, Dobby has been cleaning for almost 500 hours now. At that price point, there is no cheaper hourly cleaning staff :)
Gosh, we're approaching the marketing singularity
As a former roomba owner, the issue I always had was that it was pretty terrible about coverage. The random walk it did often left large areas vacuumed as it had no sense of where it had and had not vacuumed.
It costs $1400 here, literally $1000 more than the basic Roomba models, and still $400-600 more than buying a Roomba mop and vacuum separately.
I can't even get a chicken waterer to work for months at a time, no way I'd let a robot access. Even so, is it so bad to let China take the lead, western design can go on vacay and rip off the results when they get back!
You can clone the design if there's capital left after consumers have been buying the competitor for years, but can you clone the manufacturing process or price as easily when you're years behind?
We see with Qualcomm CPUs and Android phones - the internals are still a few years behind iPhone after about a decade, and Apple still takes the lions share of profits in the phone market.
But on the S4 I find sometimes it underperforms with navigation: it ends up relying on the bumpers and it smashes into table and desk legs even though the lidar should give it a heads-up (the legs are visible on the map it creates).
I'm wondering if it updates the map as it cleans but only _uses_ the updated map once the current clean is finished. Hmmmm
But then maybe that's where the synergy is. Amazon is probably ahead of everyone on the planet with machine vision. They have the Amazon Go shops, and nobody else has anything that comes close. If they take iRobot's robotics knowledge and couple it with their own machine learning expertise, who will be able to compete with them?
It had better be truly amazing, it's 4x the price I paid for my old Roomba 780 many a year ago that did a decent job of it until it died after 5-6 years of service.
And here I am using a broomstick 5 min every day... I feel like we're going to hit the great filter pretty soon
Well for 1500 Eur it better does all of it and even more
10 million customers = data about 10 million homes. Plus some revenues, why not.
- Ecovacs control requires cloud.
No thanks. I'm not giving my home to China, America or whatever.
Roborock seems to be better. Anyway it should be blocked by the home firewall, just to be safe.
https://topnews.in/ten-most-boring-videos-youtube-revealed-2...
Over 1M views! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLOPygVcaVE
Meanwhile, iRobot still hadn’t figured out how to make an effective stand-alone mop bot, much less an auto fill station or combined bot that actually works. Roborock and Ecovacs products launch in China 6-12 months before their US launch. By the time Roomba has a decent mop bot, the X2 or X3 will probably be out offering integration with home plumbing to avoid any manual intervention for months at a time.
EDIT: commenters are asking what works offline from Roborock / Ecovacs. For the self-cleaning-mop generation like the X1 Omni:
- Roborock obstacle avoidance is local, but works better with cloud.
- Roborock can be controlled by a local home automation server without internet access.
- Ecovacs obstacle avoidance requires cloud.
- Ecovacs control requires cloud.
I remembered these stats from a Youtube video that I can't find; probably in my partner's history since we watched reviews on the TV together.
I picked the X1 Omni over the Roborock because it has superior mopping performance on tile floors, but I think both would be good options. It seems like Roborock is more privacy compatible.