I for some reason decided to get a pair of robot vacuums recently, this was perhaps a way to somehow distract myself from the imminent doom and ignore my inability to alter the present moment! It is halfway working.
Anyway, the Roborock s8 Max-V Ultra is really nice.
I previously have owned a Roomba, which mostly bounced around randomly and liked to chew on things. The Roomba was not good. This is something else!
The path finding on the Roborock is amazing, as it features a rotating LIDAR turret, apparently two additional side distance sensors, “cliff” (stair) sensors, and an RGB camera on the front. It is pretty good at avoiding cords, though I had to set up some no-go zones around some chairs that had tripod-like legs, as the roborock sort of tries to climb them. It is very good with flat obstacle avoidance. I feel I could not code something this smart.
Here are some pictures of the app because I think the map pictures showing where it drives when cleaning are amazing:
I have blurred the names of my rooms so you can’t tell where the secret mad science laboratory is! Just kidding - there isn’t one! Or is there? I mean, there isn’t one.
What’s pretty cool is you can choose to vacuum rooms twice with a square criss-cross pattern from this screen, and this produces some really neat extra smooth carpet that you can’t really get with a human no matter how hard you try.
Another great feature is it can mop and vacuum in one pass. The mopping is mostly for dust, I’d say, but it vacuums on one end and mops on the other end as it goes. There is a water tank for clean water, and it drives back a few times while cleaning the floor to clean the mop, and pumps all the dirty water into a separate bucket. I definitely like having the water tank built into the dock.
So far I don’t know much about reliability other than what I’ve read on the internet (it seems very good), but I had a small wheel problem with one unit I bought and customer service was helpful in returning it and giving me a refund. I bought it’s replacement from Best Buy to maybe make things simpler. Overseas support worked great for me, there was a 24 hour delay in emails asking for some details but they were great and we got the return ready to go in a few days. They do have a stateside (US) you can ship things to.
Here’s a photo of the mopping options screen:
In all the app is really nice.
There are some map editing limitations. You can only establish 10 “no-go” zone rectangles on a given floor. These are areas that the robot will not cross. You can also set some number of “invisible walls” that they will also not cross. Because I needed to make sure it didn’t vacuum a few nicer rugs, I basically had to say it couldn’t clean a few rooms, as there is no way to mark a “don’t vacuum” zone.
Another limitation is that there is a finite total number of room names in a database table. If you add too many rooms, you may find that some room names you are not using are filling up the table, and then you can’t name any more rooms or maybe even add any more rooms. However, with some looking in the app, you can delete these unused room names. In general though, the user experience is pretty good.
The robot does though detect carpet and floors automatically, and also has a setting in the map where you can assign the direction of wood flooring, so it mostly mops in that direction. There are two kinds of mopping technology, there is a spinning mop system in other units that Reddit seems to like, though I think the vibrating flat mop is just fine and has theoretically less moving parts.
One amusing thing I like is that if you tell the robot to vacuum and a room is dark, it turns on its headlights and will continue doing what it wants to do. It is also very good about vacuuming under beds.
The successor to the v8 is the new “Saros” line which I don’t have experience with. One version still uses LIDAR (apparently without a rotating turret now) and another has a more camera-based system. While the non-rotating turret seems to be “less moving parts” which seems good, there are also new moving parts because the system can raise up and down to cross thresholds (something I didn’t need) - so I’m not sure if it’s going to be more or less reliable. I also decided to get the old v8 unit because apparently the new line, being super new, had a few bugs that might need to get patched out.
In all, the difference between the Roomba is ginormous, and I was quite suprised how much dirty water can still be found from mopping what I thought were relatively clean floors every couple of days. The nav system’s ability to jump around chair rails and things like that is absolutely phenomenal, and I have some tools that are just barely wider than the robot that it can slide in between, vacuuming around each leg in circles.
I did have to sort of make the house “safe” in a few places, usually by adding some cable management boxes, but mostly the device wants to stay out of trouble. Weird bases on lounge chairs seem to be one thing it can’t quite understand, but mostly I trust it, as compared to the Roomba which would try to find things to snack on.
I haven’t tried out some of the features, such as one that lets you drive around the house and look through the camera. There is a hardware feature to activate this that is local only that seems to resolve most privacy concerns. I’m also not exactly sure how much you need the camera, but it can also photograph “obstacles” if you turn that on, I do think it does improve the navigation even when off though, at least, that’s my understanding from internet reading.
It is nice to have new robot friends and is very entertaining. If I still have to vacuum some places it can’t quite get to or I have kept it out of, it still gets 85% of everything and in those areas does a better job than I can do. It probably doesn’t vacuum quite as deeply as a really good Dyson stick vacuum on “high” (and definitely not something like a Bissel Big Green Clean Machine) but for everything noticeable I’m very happy with it.
If you are wanting a new robot friend that is also helpful at the same time, I would recommend it! I still need a robot that sorts and folds laundry and maybe cleans baseboards.