I realized I was spending 30-60 minutes debugging and manually charging our roombas for each (usually aborted) run. Once the Amazon acquisition was announced, I realized it meant that they'd inevitably send upskirt angle shots of the family to Bezos for ad targeting and forwarding to local law enforcement agencies. That was the final straw.
Supposedly, the Chinese ones are slightly better for privacy because you can MITM their backend cloud connection and point it at a local version of whatever service the robot thinks it needs in order to work.
I bought a broom and mop. They're much less work. So were the older, dumber roombas (especially the square mops from the Mint acquisition). YMMV.
The _exact_ same problem Braava has. Whenever the wheels collect a small amount of dust, they slip too much and the robot can't climb. I actually added sandpaper to the base to help with the grip. Seems like such an easy fix; it's mind boggling that the same issue is present across models, for years!
> I bought a broom and mop. They're much less work.
Yeah, although, if you have pets, even a not so reliable robot will massively cut the amount of cleaning you have to manually do.
I'll omit the competitor that I use now. I'll just say that it has a base that empties the robot dust bin, refills the clean tank, empties the dirty water tank, washes and dries the mop. And the mop actually looks like something that resembles a mop (and rotates), it's far better than the 'swiffer' kind of thing that the Braava has, or that the J9 has. I don't see the same wet dirt issue because the navigation takes care of that.
It does have a camera and the parent company is indeed Chinese.
Neato is even worse and their robots aren't much better than they were 5 years ago. They started out really strong but any improvements were marginal.
To be clear, the CCP definitely has a detailed map of my home. But man, I've got two dogs that shed a lot, and it's great. Sometimes you've gotta accept the tradeoffs, y'know?
The robot would get clogged frequently. A few parts would just stop working. Went through 2 replacements before calling it quits.
Switched to Roborock and haven’t looked back. Going on 1 yr now.
Seems like an easy company to replicate (and it has been too)
A foreign entity would have no obstructions to using collected information as ruthlessly as possible, whereas even a corrupt/politically-motivated/unrestrained domestic entity would have to weigh the comparatively massive risk of being implicated or exposed.
“what are they going to do with it?”
If you have valuable information or responsibilities, that could be motivation enough for foreign agents to seek leverage. If you don’t, then it’s equally fantastic to think the CIA gives a shit about you for some reason.
Don't forget – if someone unlocks your door and leaves it ajar, then anyone can get in.
Chinese companies are not well known for their cyber security practices. Even if you don't care how they could use this information (either individually, or in the aggregate across millions of people), you should also care about who else would be able to hack into the feed.
You don't want a "kia boyz" situation with a camera in your home. Imagine some kid finds an easily exploitable vulnerability and releases some software allowing anyone to tap into your camera? This has happened with security cameras already. It's even worse these days with cloud connected equipment, all you need is a vulnerability in the cloud command and control.
And, although most US agencies are not allowed to collect data from citizens in US soil, they can (and have) collected data procured from elsewhere.
The bottom line is, the same information can end up much, much closer to you.
I think most of the competitors will use a camera for object detection and a LiDAR for navigation, since LiDAR is faster than VSLAM.
I’m very weary of buying a robot vacuum with a camera from a Chinese company. I don’t fully trust iRobot, but I trust them much more than I trust Chinese brands.
I also couldn’t see myself going back to a robot vacuum without a camera. After I got kids our old Neato vacuum robot got very little use since it always required that everything was picked up off the floor.
That being said I’m quite frustrated by my new J9. It’s supposed to have a feature called SmartScrub, but it’s not in the app. The robot is also supposed to drive back to the base to refill its water tank, but it hasn’t done that a single time since we bought it a month ago. The combination of vacuuming and mopping is also a bit unfortunate since it sucks up a lot of humid air when passing over areas that it’s already mopped, causing a buildup of wet-ish dirt in the air duct.