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.
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.