[ninkendo]

Not GP, but I use a Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra, which was the top of the line model earlier this year. I also just set it to run at night when I’m not paying attention to it. It’s… fine, I guess.

But if there is anything at all on your floor that will get stuck in its rollers, it will get stuck on it. Like 100% of the time. I’ve seen everything. Charge cables, towels, kids toys, any small pieces of fabric, anything you can think of. It has a camera and is supposed to avoid all these things, but it straight up never works. I have a nightly routine where I clear everything I can from the floors to make room for it, and it manages to find the one thing I didn’t see. And looking at its history it always ends up getting stuck in the first 5 minutes which means the whole clean is a bust.

I would wager my overall success rate (nights where it does its whole job and doesn’t get stuck) is maybe 70%. Just good enough that it’s “worth it” but it’s so frustrating that it can’t simply steer around this stuff, especially when it’s advertised as being able to.

I could rant about the other stuff I hate about it, but suffice to say I still feel that good cleaning robots need another 5-10 years before I could fully recommend them.

[dheera]

I wonder why there haven't been more effort into roller-less vacuums. Shop vac style, just air, no exposed moving parts other than wheels.

For all of us who have no carpet, and pets that shed hair that tie up rollers, it would make perfect sense.

[ninkendo]

I’m pretty sure mine doesn’t engage the rollers unless it’s on carpet, so that’s something.

Related, my second most hated aspect of it, is that it doesn’t empty its dust bin in mid-clean. Oh, it can empty its dust bin at the end, and it knows how to empty in mid-clean, because it empties it when it’s washing its mop (which it does know to do mid-clean, and you can even configure how many minutes it should go before re-washing.) But noooo, it has no idea that maybe its bin will get full and that it should empty it even without needing to wash the mop.

Because I have a German Shepherd and it can easily fill up its bin with dog hair after 10 minutes of carpet cleaning, and after that it’s just pushing clumps of dog hair around from one end of the room to another.

It’s so frustrating because the engineers did a great job of making the thing able to self-empty its bin in the first place, and thought enough to code for and allow configuration of mid-clean mop washing. But they didn’t connect the dots and consider that some people have large pets and may need the dust bin to get the same treatment as the mop.

[dheera]

If only their software was open source ... but probably some CEO insisted that they be closed source because of "competitors"

[phpnode]

because current battery technology cannot support it

[klabb3]

> It has a camera and is supposed to avoid all these things, but it straight up never works. I have a nightly routine

Try running it in daylight. Mine from Eufy is similar, has a flashlight, but good ambient light is superior. Still, the cameras and image recognition is extremely flaky imo (the Ai parts), whereas the LiDAR for navigation is absolutely spectacular. Even if you move furniture around and drop it randomly in a different room it always finds its current location in less than a minute.