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Comment by konsnos | Hacker News Reader

The robot vacuums cleaner technology seems to finally be useful enough, although it still has improvements to make. I've just recently acquired a $400 RoboRock s50. Comparing its features with the $900 Roomba, I can say it's worth it. The s50 tries to mop the floor albeit just with water. It is very good with carpets though. I ordered it from China and I was anxious if I would have to use translation software to understand the manual but thankfully the s50 has the voice commands, manual and the mobile app translated into English. The scheduled cleaning is really worth it. Make sure to keep away cables and curtains that reach the floor. Once, the wind got the curtain around the cleaner and the sensor detected obstacles everywhere and stopped. The app notified me that I need to remove obstacles which I did promptly and continued to clean until it finished. I am not really sure what's stopping Roborock to make the maps permanent like the Roomba.

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The English version of the RoboRock marketing is quite amusing: https://www.gearbest.com/robot-vacuum/pp_954639.html

> Super cleaning like a tornado. Nothing is left after a tornado, you can walk on the floor with bare feet

> Easy to climb 2cm of Obstacle. Nothing can stop the robot's steps

> With a strong power, the robot absorbs all the debris, steel beads, soybeans, dust, millet or any other wastes all in a sudden (is that's what typically lying around?)

GearBest suggests that while buying the S50 robot, I should also adds two accessories and save: an Espresso machine and another portable Espresso machine.

That makes perfect sense. While s50 is cleaning you have time for coffee.

And, I mean, just think about all the spilt beans and grounds. Gonna need a tornado to clean that up.

Also owner of a Roborock S50, can confirm, bang for the buck is much better than with Roombas. My only gripe is indeed that the maps are not persistent. In fact it's even more absurd, they are persistent in the sense that you can see previous maps, they are stored, but it doesn't take them into account to optimize the next cleaning session and, more importantly, you cannot use them for the ever useful zoned cleaning function. Why? It seems that all the components needed are already there, and looks like it should be a trivial software update to enable this.

Anyway, an amazing vacuum and absolutely great for the price.

I also recently bought one and noticed the same, but then I think I understood the reason for not persisting the maps, when the robot found a closed door: after I opened the door, the robot just wouldn't cross it because of the (temporarily) stored temporary obstacle.

Storing a map also means you need to have a very good way to update it.

Also own a s50, most annoying thing for me is that you can't do reverse clean up zones, ie. Tell it where CAN'T clean. Also, Saving zoned cleanups would be a time saver. And rotating of the map for when it misalign them, which it keep doing sometimes even after following their instructions.

This is their answer when I emailed about rotatable map;

"Dear The map takes the environment near the starting point as a reference. If there are some things near the starting point, it will cause the Robot to draw a deformed map. In this case, please move the dock charger to an open area to solve this problem. Please ensure to retain 0.5 m or more in two sides and 1.5 m or more in the front of the dock charger. "

> Please ensure to retain 0.5 m or more in two sides and 1.5 m or more in the front of the dock charger.

I'm struggling to think of any open space that large within my apartment. 3 m² is about 6.5% of my apartment's total area.

Put it next to a door opening, then you only need free space on one side

These are underrated. I have the original Xiaomi and it works great. I sold my $700 Neato botvac connected and paid half for this one. It isn't even the best and can do our whole house with no intervention consistently.

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