[nerdjon]

I don't understand this, I had a Neato before I switched to iRobot and the lidar just seemed to be the worst idea for a home environment.

On an almost weekly basis it would fail to start because it would think it was moved if something just moved a little bit nearby or a cat just happened to be sleeping nearby. This generally forced me to remap

Then it would constantly get lost and be confused about what room it was in. Seemingly for the same reasons of things moving around.

A home isn't a static environment and a camera just seems much more efficient. Not that a camera is perfect, but at least a camera can account for things moving around were lidar cannot.

Or was this a case of Neato just not being good? The lidar issues was why I went with iRobot. It was a worse vacuum but if it actually works consistently than I can just have it run more often.

[moepstar]

I've a Xiami / Roborock S5 for almost 5 years now (give or take a few months) and their LIDAR implementation is absolutely genius - no issues whatsoever, no matter what gets moved around or not...

Must've been Neatos implementation i suppose...

On top of the really top-notch LIDAR the S5 is beautifully engineered as well - basically everything is a module (i.e. wheel+motor) which is plugged in and secured with a few screws - really good repairability and also spares are available (needed so far: 1 LIDAR motor, 2,50€; 1 resettable fuse for charging).

[nerdjon]

I have been eyeing the new Roborock S7, but that has both lidar and camera I think.

Interesting that others handle this better. I had heard great things about Neato before so that's why I went it. But it just ended up being more frustrating and not worth it.

Guess I just had a really bad experience.

[KptMarchewa]

I would not complement S5 that much. Mine can never return to the dock alone, which is pretty basic - it knows where it is, but tries to move there from a weird angle, repeats this few times and ultimately loudly fails. Also, it always gets stuck on dryer rack.

The engineering on the modularity is neat though, I agree.

[moepstar]

Hm, that's strange - i've even used mine in 2 apartments now, on 4 floors no less..

No issues whatsoever - on the floor where there is no dock it just goes back to the point you dropped it off and started cleaning...

> Also, it always gets stuck on dryer rack.

Have you tried to put some magnetic tape (barrier) on to the legs?

[fomine3]

For Dreame Z10 (it also has LiDAR and Xiaomi sub brand), I confirmed the same. Moving objects is not a problem.

[jitl]

> Or was this a case of Neato just not being good?

I think this is a software issue with Neato. My previous bot was the cheapest Ecovacs with LiDAR and vacuum base station, and it could adapt to furniture movement, large boxes appearing and disappearing in the living room, etc without too much trouble.

LiDAR (on the Ecovacs bots) does struggle with mirrors and floor-to-ceiling windows. Even the X1 Omni is convinced there's another room "inside" the large mirror I have in the living room. It's okay though since I just draw a no-go zone or no-go lines on the map wherever there's something odd.

Really the best results will always use sensor fusion - LiDAR mapping + camera object avoidance + physical bump sensor seems to work pretty well on the Ecovacs bots. I love the improvement in cable and shoelace avoidance since upgrading to a model with vision.

[swores]

> but at least a camera can account for things moving around were lidar cannot

Why do you say that, am I missing something? Surely both technologies are able to keep "looking" as the hoover moves around, the lidar ones surely aren't doing a single analysis and then not checking again?

[nerdjon]

Others have mentioned that this may just be a problem with the Neato software.

The issue I was having with the neato is that is exactly what it was doing. It would come off its dock, do a scan around it. And if things were too different it would go back to its dock and complain that it has been moved.

So I had to find a place that things never moved, but that proved difficult. Even small things like the trash can shifting or books on a shelf shifting seem to throw it off.

I finally got to the point that I basically tricked it with blocking it from seeing certain things near its dock but that is less than ideal.

Now once it did that initial scan it seemed to be mostly ok, but it did seem too often get lost near my computer where the chair often moves. It would constantly tell me it was lost and I had to pick it up and put it back on the dock. Or my favorite was when it seemed to try to dock on the other side of my home.

My feeling (and has been confirmed by the iRobot) was that at least a camera with decent AI could account for a moving object vs most other things being the same. It is far from perfect, but compared to the Neato the camera has been leagues better.

I am very curious though how other Lidar system handle this since I would assume that there is a lack of data available to identify a change in environment vs a moved object.

[swores]

That does sound shit, sorry you've had that experience!

But I believe lidar should be able to do the same as a camera in terms of real-time updates - from a tech point of view it's just a different type of sensor to a camera, there's no reason (other than difficulty/cost) why lidar robots can't be constantly scanning & understanding the difference between a chair that you've moved since 5 minutes earlier and a cat that keeps moving. Both camera and lidar products can be made dumb enough to fail badly, or smart enough to do a great job. After all, self driving cars have been demo'd using full lidar, it's not like that technology itself takes hours to image a room.

[moepstar]

Of course i can only talk about my Roborock S5, but that one handles each and any changes in the environment flawlessly.

While cleaning, you can watch it on the map (in the cloud/app as well as when rooted on the local webserver) and can see it constantly scanning the surroundings and things appearing when they do.

I once saw an object "appearing" when there should've been none when i was out, when i got back home it was my cat that wanted to roadblock the Roborock, laying on the floor...

[_ea1k]

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.

[nomel]

What you described is completely unrelated to LiDAR, and could just as lazily be implemented with a SLAM based vision stack. LiIDAR and vision based systems make 3d measurements of what the sensors see, whenever they look at it. What's done with those measurements in software isn't related to the ability to collect the real-time sensing of those distances.

[marcinzm]

My Roborock with Lidar has had no issues.