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Comment by ballballball | Hacker News Reader

I too bought a robotic vacuum out of curiosity (high end iRobot) and found the algorithm to be completely inadequate both in it's mapping and it's ability to adequately cover the area that it was supposed to clean. Additionally it left random patterns in the carpet that could only be described as a drunk toddler vacuuming... in other words, it didn't look clean. It took more than 3 days to map the three rooms that it was supposed to clean, getting stuck away from it's base unable to return because it's charge ran out. It would also get stuck under my bed. I'm not certain how it's possible that it could have done a worse job. I waited for years to enter the robot vacuum market and can state unequivocally that waiting 9 generations wasn't enough of a wait.

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I had a Roomba sometime after 2006 and it was dumb but not in a bad way. It had a drop sensor, bump sensor, and tire sensors. It would primarily move in a switch back overlapping pattern and had a couple different fallback patterns that would kick in if the bump sensor triggered to frequently. It didn't necessarily hit 100% of space in the first try but it could autodock and recharge, and had a couple invisible walls to cordon it off.

It got stuck occasionally and needed to be rescued but once you knew what it got stuck on you could clean up, as you would with normal vacuuming, and it would be mostly fine.

The newer robot vacuums have a lot more tech but don't seem to have improved upon the basic functionality much. They still get stuck a lot, have trouble with deep pile carpet, and don't get everything.

You should have got the Roborock S6, I have the S5 (older model) and its surprisingly good for around 300 USD.

It vacuums in laps, no random fumbling around and hoping you've gotten the room. We have a longhair cat and I run it around the apartment every couple days, filling entirely with cat hair every time from one cat in a hardwood floor apartment. It's been great.

Yep, I have the RoboRock S5 and it's light years ahead of my old Roomba.

I honestly have no idea how Roomba is still in business

It keeps getting better, too! The new update makes the S5 basically the same as the newer model (except that it's louder)... I had the original RoboRock and it worked really well. We replaced the battery and gave it to my wife's grandmother, then bought the S5 thinking the mop feature would be in some way useful, but I'm still happy with how well the S5 tracks its brush/filter lifespan and the software upgrades!

Yeah, the mop feature is a joke. I took one look at it and realized that instantly. Everything else about it is pretty sweet though.

I like the mop feature. It is far from a true mopping, but still the floor feels less dusty than after just using the vacuum alone. That said, it may be a placebo effect on my part. I should do a blind test someday.

The problem with the mop feature is that it completely defeats the purpose of having an unattended robot keep your whole house clean, since you have to constantly refill the water reservoir, and it can't transition between carpet and hard floors without getting water on your carpet.

I guess depends on the area. It gets through our ground floor, which are all wood, with just a bit of water left over. Maybe 700 Sq ft

So I don't know which one you have, but my mum bought herself the S9+ for christmas and wow, we were actually betting that it will fail as she lives in a huge house with a relatively complex layout(the living room has a circular shape with multiple entrances and central staircase) but nope, the robot deals with all of it fine. It takes longer than the 2 hour battery life to clean it all, but that's not a problem - it goes back to the base, empties its own bin, recharges, and then continues where it left off. It's truly amazing in terms of how well the mapping deals with that house, it shouldn't be that good.

The Neato vacuums do a much better job in this respect IMHO. They figure out the space with lidar and use a rectangular pattern.

Absolutely. I've had both and the Neato is much better than the Roomba. The way I look at it - it's as if the Roomba was designed by students that just took a class on chaos theory and watched Jurassic Park, where the Neato was designed by actual engineers. The Roomba is fun to watch bounce around randomly. The Neato just vacuums the carpet in a logical algorithm, the same way a human would, more or less.

The Neato and RoboRock vacuums are the only ones I recommend for their efficient navigation. Although I had three different Neatos die on me, so now I only use RoboRock.

Neato has been doing localization/mapping based vacuum since earlier, so they're obviously more sophisticated. But anecdotally with the state of the floor as the metric, 622 seems to do better than XV-11 despite being horribly dumb.

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