| I've felt that the iRobot mapping was acceptable. Once my i7 has generated a proper map, it will will slow down when it approaches known walls, or even places where obstacles have been several times in the past. It will need to bump into the obsticle or wall to confirm its position though. It does use a mostly predictable back and forth pattern, taking note of areas with walls/obstacles, and after the main sweeping it will combe back to go around the obstacles, and finally (optional) do a sweep of the walls. Then it moves onto the next room. The system does have limitations. For example, if it needs assistance in the middle of a clean job, after you fix it, there is a reasonable chance that it will do dumb stuff afterwards, like missing a large section of floor. (It seems to even know this, but have problematic coding that prevents it from doing the right thing). But yeah, I'd not call the mapping good, just acceptable. There are other annoyances like the i7 battery being so small, especially since they have a giant battery compartment. Like seriously big enough like ni-cad batteries battery of equivalent capacity. But they only offer a slightly larger capacity battery as part of their Costco exclusive model, and try to lock out third party batteries. The net result is that even when brand new, it could not quite do a single floor of my house in one go, needing to go recharge for like 40 minutes before it could do the last 10 minutes of cleaning. The app is not very good. It does not even do some basic things like prompt the user for regular maintenance periodically based on number of hours used. The floor maps in the app are weird. For example, on one of my floors, the online map decided that the entrance to one of my rooms was on a completely different wall from where the entrance really was. It thought the actual door was just a wall. However the actually mapping data on the robot was just fine. It knew where the door really was, and never tried to drive though the wall where the online map though the door was. |