Re:Amazon to acquire maker of Roomba vacuum for roughly $1.7B
by jsight on Friday August 05, 2022 @11:24AM
(#32357479)
I have a neato and yeah, I think its neato's software. Its chock full'o'bugs. It routinely loses network connectivity and has to be rebooted to restore it. Of course, support will blame signal, but I've had that issue too and the behavior is different. A dead spot will just lose signal until it moves past it and gracefully recovers. This causes a weird error beep and then it doesn't recover.
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.
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.