Roomba / iRobot is years behind the Chinese companies. We just got an Ecovacs X1 Omni - a mopping vacuum bot with actual rotating mop scrubbers, AI vision obstacle avoidance, LIDAR mapping, and most importantly fully automated water fill & mop pad cleaning at the base station. We fill a clean water tank & empty the dirty one about once a week. Floors are spotless - huge difference from static cloth mopping bots.
Meanwhile, iRobot still hadn’t figured out how to make an effective stand-alone mop bot, much less an auto fill station or combined bot that actually works. Roborock and Ecovacs products launch in China 6-12 months before their US launch. By the time Roomba has a decent mop bot, the X2 or X3 will probably be out offering integration with home plumbing to avoid any manual intervention for months at a time.
EDIT: commenters are asking what works offline from Roborock / Ecovacs. For the self-cleaning-mop generation like the X1 Omni:
- Roborock obstacle avoidance is local, but works better with cloud.
- Roborock can be controlled by a local home automation server without internet access.
- Ecovacs obstacle avoidance requires cloud.
- Ecovacs control requires cloud.
I remembered these stats from a Youtube video that I can't find; probably in my partner's history since we watched reviews on the TV together.
I picked the X1 Omni over the Roborock because it has superior mopping performance on tile floors, but I think both would be good options. It seems like Roborock is more privacy compatible.
Yeah I went from a Roomba 960 (2018) to a Xiaomi Roborock S7 and in my research it was eye opening to see the level of tech difference between the two, even the modern Roomba is using a vision only model, and poorly based on reviews. For the same price, Roborock has Lidar scanning, AI obstacle avoidance and mopping. The thing is, it actually works in the Roborock, it can even spot cords and other misc items around my house and avoid them entirely.
Additionally since it maps using Lidar it completes a complete cleaning of my living room + kitchen area in 22 minutes, whole house in under 40 minutes. That is with it covering literally every square inch of carpet & tile instead of going around in random patterns...
As others have said, suction isn't as good as a regular vacuum. But what makes it great is it can do its thing while I'm away. I'm quite lazy and hate vacuuming, so there's no way I'd do it manually more than once a week. But the bot does its thing daily, so my house is generally cleaner. It also has a rotating brush that makes the carpet much fluffier than the regular vacuum, and seems to be better at pulling out hair.
Navigation-wise it's not too bad. I have to remove wires, socks and similar from the floor, or it WILL get tangled. The only thing which is a bit stupid is that it doesn't seem to know its height, so it can sometimes get stuck under things. But I've put some 2 mm wood blocks under that shelf, and now everyone's happy.
I feel like the major consideration is: do you have kids or pets? Then get one. Otherwise, probably not worth it.
If you have small-ish kids, you end up vacuuming everyday one way or the other. A Roomba's a decent stand-in for that. When my kids aren't at home, I mostly get by with my stick vacuum. (There the battery-driven ones really are nice.) With the stick vacuum it doesn't tend to leave my cables and rugs in random places, which makes the daily non-kid-time vacuuming similar levels of effort.
I assume pets are a similar deal, though I'm not a pet person.
One thing that hadn't occurred to me before getting the Roomba is that it vacuums a lot of places I wouldn't regularly get to on my own (e.g. under the sofa), and there's some benefit of having a cleaning session frequently that gets to a lot of those places that are otherwise hard to reach. But again, with kids not at home, I run it about once a week.
I'm genuinely curious about the mopping ones since I don't mop often, and always like it when I do. ;-)
Regarding pets: I decided to give a cheaper Eufy RoboVac model a try a couple years ago to help keep things under control with a dog in the house. The maintenance on it to remove entangled dog hair was just too much in the end. Sure, manual vacuums have a similar problem but seem easier to maintain. The RoboVac had no computer vision (local or cloud) to help with obstacles, but that wasn't really as much as an issue as mechanical failures.
Yes, this is why my Roomba doesn't get much use anymore in our house. There's always a loose toy somewhere. We have to have the kids pick up all the toys first before we can vacuum. At that point we end up using a Miele canister vac instead. We can see what we're about to vacuum up. It ended up being the better purchase over the Roomba.
I don't usually let it go in the kids room unless it's right after they've cleaned. The main problem areas in the apartment are right in front of the door, where they take off their shoes (so much sand, always!) and under the kitchen table. And from my messes: in the kitchen, from cooking. Those are the areas I was vacuuming most days by hand before. Again, the main problematic things for me are dragging around cables (from my stereo) and moving rugs, but those aren't more than a few seconds to put back. It gets stuck on something else maybe every 2-3 runs.
My experience with a couple lower end ones and a sheddy dog is that they work well for what they are. Don't expect magic. Expect low effort daily maintenance cleaning that keeps things spiffy. Maybe the higher end ones are significantly better? My bet is that the cleaning isn't all that different since among a product line they largely use the same chassis--there is only so much sweeper/suction/storage they can have.
The one upgrade that would be useful in retrospect is electronic fencing, but it isn't a big deal.
We have a 120qm2 apartment, 2 cats, 1 dog and a child. We couldn‘t live without our Roborock S7. It runs everyday and sometimes even more. No big issues, vacuums, mops, would buy it again in a heartbeat.
I have the S6 and it's so friggen useful even if just for the cat hair. The little mop addon is solid too! I just spray areas that have some sticky / dried on goop and it handles the rest.
I have 2 of them, a 2-3 year old Xiamoi S5 and some way newer Shark. The shark is frustrating to watch, it bangs into things constantly and doesn't give up. I have to go fix the Shark all the time because it drove over or into something, for instance I have a very low TV stand with open drawers, and it will try and try until it drives right in, and then gets stuck. So I have to have a lot more boundaries with the Shark than the Xiomi. The S5 is pretty impressive with its tech and I'd only buy a xiomi at. this point.
With that said, NEITHER are a replacement for a real vaccuum. I would only recommend them for wood floors to pick up pet hair and things like that. I'm really, realyy disappointed with how they work on carpet.
The xiomi is also a lot more powerful than my Shark.
If there's some vaccuum bot that can almost take the place of a real vaccuum on carpet please let me know because I don't vaccuum enough at all.
Unfortunately I also have halfway carpeted stairs and I need to get some sort of vaccuum that isn't miserable to use on stairs.. Please dont carpet stairs. I have a really nice Shark big vaccuum but its not fun to do stairs with it.
> If there's some vaccuum bot that can almost take the place of a real vaccuum on carpet please let me know because I don't vaccuum enough at all.
If that one famous vacuum-repairman AMA on Reddit is to be believed, even most home upright vacuums don't produce enough suction to properly clean carpet. No way they're gonna fit that much power in a little disc-shaped, quiet robot.
Right, but without enough suction it's just not going to get any of the dirt down in the carpet, no matter how many times it goes over it. It'll just get light stuff that's right on the surface. Shitty upright vacs (so, the vast majority of upright vacs) sometimes try to make up for this with really aggressive brushes, but that barely helps and is really bad for the carpet—I don't think Roombas have enough room or power to even try that inferior work-around, let alone to generate a strong enough vacuum to really clean carpet.
That might be enough if the carpet starts relatively clean though - most of the deep down dirt gets pushed down through repeated use - stamping around a carpet with muddy boots will definitely ruin things quick but if you're conscientious about usage you're usually leaving surface level dirt that a mini-vacuum can scoop up if it's run frequently enough.
Roombas or similar things definitely can't keep a rug clean forever, but I think it's fair to say they'll make the times you need to get the heavy duty pet vac out less frequent.
We have a Roomba, though I think it's back in its box in a cupboard now. In the end it needed so much babysitting that I gave up and bought a cordless stick vacuum. That is the best home appliance purchase I've ever made. The lower hassle of not needing to extend and roll up the cord compared with my older vaccuum massively outweighs any benefit from the Roomba. Grabbing the stick, quickly buzzing it around for a couple of minutes and putting it away again is far less hassle than babysitting the Roomba.
We've got cats - and we just invested in like four brooms for our small condo - if you see some fur accumulating you can sweep it up before it becomes a gigantic rug of cat fur.
I'll usually sweep our main hallway twice a day which is a nice two minute brain break from work. As someone with ADHD working these sorts of chores into a very frequent and regular schedule is important or nothing will ever happen.
I've got a relatively old Roomba. It's pretty great. Yeah it gets stuck on stuff when the kids leave things on the floor. Yeah the docking isn't super reliable. But... it's a level of passive, continuous cleaning that just makes everything easier around the house. I will definitely replace it when it dies, and spend more money on a better one.
I got a lower end one on sale and even it has made a positive difference for us. We vacuum less often, but the floor is noticeably cleaner.
My wife was positive we’d be vacuuming just as much, insisted it was just a novelty, but we went from pretty much daily to weekly manual with the bot running daily.
Probably obvious but we realized letting it run in the evening after dinner while we clean made the most sense. You wake up to a clean floor. Prior to that we had it running in the middle of the day while we worked. Effectively it never seemed quite as clean.
Doesn't really get stuck (only time was when it "found" a fallen t-shirt behind a cabinet).
They do clean well for me, as long as I do it regularly. If I don't do it for a week it needs a second pass. But how much you need depends on external factors. Literally external, like how much dust gets in from outside.
Mine handled carpets well. IME of course. I didn't had pets when I had carpets, but at least with wooden floors cat hair gets cleaned fine.
Only caveat is if you have levels in your house you have to bring it up and down stairs but that's not asking much.
Thanks for the link, that looks like it'll fit the bill whenever I scrounge up a vacuum.
Although I think trying to convince vendors they want less data seems a little naive. More likely they'll lock out work like this entirely to make sure the free floor maps of your house (and schedule, and pet presence, and...) keep coming.
> More likely they'll lock out work like this entirely to make sure the free floor maps of your house (and schedule, and pet presence, and...) keep coming.
If your Roomba is rooted, then can't you disable OTA updates to prevent them from doing this?
I mean for future products. I'm not sure they'd care enough to patch up previous hardware. Just my personal opinion based on hardware manufacturers in general though.
I have an S7 and it’s been ridiculously stupid. My old Roomba was less aggravating. The S7 takes 50 minutes to clean 800sqft, always gets stuck in a high rug or chair support. Frequently gets tangled on cables and toys. I can clean tht floor in 10 min with a stick vacuum. Anyone wanna buy an old S7? Barely used, frequently kicked.
The only annoying Xiaomi moments are when it recognizes a sock as dog poo then refuses to do anything in that area (or I couldn't figure out how to reset it). Ah, and it constantly gets stuck on bar stools pedestals.
Can confirm, source: me, cat owner - had to take apart the Xiaomi / Roborock S5 (surprisingly easy), clean it up from cat vomit and also clean the living room entirely...
I've owned Neato, Roomba and Roborock. Hands down Roborock is what I recommend people to buy. Neato had such a great leg up when it first came to market by having the first, and best, Lidar implementation - but their product was marred by horrible customer support, batteries that are garbage and just general failures of hardware that are impossible / too expensive to fix. By the time I gave up on Neato I had 4 of the same robot that I was piece parting out as components died (again and again). Talk about a company that banks on eWaste to keep the sales cycle going.
I'm thankful Amazon bought Roomba - one less reason to even consider them as an option considering all of the current gen vacs are sporting onboard cameras + CV (poop avoidance, is that really a huge concern?).
I've had great experiences with the Xiaomi products I've bought (34" monitor, earbuds, security cam, air purifier, soundbar). They are popular here in Thailand and at a really, really great price point
The Roomba j7+ cord and object detection is working well for me, although it's (probably) more expensive than the Chinese offerings. Regardless, it was a huge step up from my precis Neato Botvac connected (which was probably 5-6 years old though).
Wow, those both look incredibly slick. I've got a cheap like $150 chinese vacuum one and a mopping one but I might have to upgrade if they ever die. So do they actually handle floor vs carpet sweeping/mopping, don't get stuck on stuff on the floor, refill/empty, and you don't have to change the mop pads each time?
That is wild as that basically handles all the prep I have to do for mine. Albeit, 1000-1500 is quite a bit more.
I own a Xiaomi Vacuum Robot and that is by default very much not local only. However there is a project [1][2] to hack some of those devices and make them local-only.
With limited functionality they work of cause without app and cloud connection.
Thanks for this, I had a pending action item to look for something like this for my robot.
On a spin-off topic from this project: it says on his website
> The Apache-2.0 license is a very permissive license and a lot of work is being shared for free here, so I trust people to not take advantage of that and sell Valetudo; especially not as their own work.
Please don’t disappoint me. Thank you.
I really don't understand why people pick licenses that specifically allow for things that they don't want to happen. It's specially baffling when the author is clearly aware of the limitation!
they work locally(local network via app or physical buttons) unless you want to use it remotely via internet. The annoying thing is that it still forces you to "create an account" when you set it up. This was not required 4 years ago but it's required now.
Absolutely agree. The lack of LiDAR (or equiv) seems to really hamper iRobot's effectiveness - I had an iRobot i7 and its mapping/pathfinding was ramming in to things at near top speed and ricocheting off the walls.
They also still sell vacuum and mopping* robots as seperate units which just drives up the cost. My old setup of the two robots took somewhere on the order of 5-6 hours to do a ~100m2 apartment.
I moved to a Roborock and then Dreame bot (someone really needs to talk to Xiaomi about all the sub-brands :P) comparitively, they both took around 1.5 to just under 2 hours to do a much better job.
I actually felt huge guilt selling my two iRobot's to someone, wanting to tell them they were complete junk and they were wasting their money.
*There is always mixed opinions on mopping effectiveness, but the iRobot roll-and-spit model of mopping is truly horrendous.
Based on the comments here I did a quick look at Amazon and was surprised to not even see a single vacuum only robot from Evovacs. At least not prominently showcased.
Why are there only mixed models and what are the benefits?
If I look at my place the ground floor is tiled and the top floor is all carpet.
That means I would need two vacuums anyway as they haven’t learned yet to climb stairs.
Why wouldn’t I want a vacuum only model for upstairs?
For downstairs the universal model is great obviously. But upstairs?
I know there were a lot of simple vac only bots in the roborock line up. S5 and similar the mopping funciton is a small pad that you manually wet and it drags along behind. It kind of sucks but if you were in the market for just a vacuum, you remove the bracket and it's fine. The robot has no knowledge of the mop as there isn't a tank.
The S6Max that has a tank, you can also remove (easily, two button clips) and it'll not attempt any mopping feature. It also supposedly doesn't squirt water on to the pad when it knows its on carpet, but at some stage you may be dragging a mildly damp cloth on to the carpet. (was never an issue for me, the pad was never that wet that you could reasonably detect it on the carpet)
Overall mopping with drag-behind pads is pretty... opportunistic? Its not great and you'll be in a position where you have to manually mop. Many models are switching to the spinning buffer pads which is a much better solution (that's the Dreame W10) but it refuses to do carpet. So its always a matter of finding a model that fits your use case.
>That means I would need two vacuums anyway as they haven’t learned yet to climb stairs.
Many allow for multi floor mapping on a single bot, but stairs will always be a problem for the Daleks. :P
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
You are absolutely right, but I’m not sure I want to have a free roaming camera and LiDAR sensor from a Chinese company in my home. Absolute piss poor track record of data collection, I’ll happily stick to my roomba. It’s definitely semi dumb but it’s predictable in its quirks. It’s also repairable with copious supply of original parts. Note also that they still innovate, including the self empty bin that actually works, which others have now copied. Just sayin’.
This is exactly my concern. Imagine a DoD contractor with a remote-controllable, lidar+camera (+mic?) equipped robot based in the USA's main rival country. Does that seem like a good idea? Should we put a fleet of Chinese robots in SpaceX's facility? Lockheed's? Why not?
It's not just "Murica first". If these were European companies, I'd jump ship very quickly to an iRobot competitor with a superior product, thanks to EU's data collection laws and USA's OK relationship with EU. But they aren't, they operate in a regime where questionable data collection is the norm and theft of IP is called "R&D".
Yes, Amazon will use iRobot to vacuum more data than dirt, but at least they are part of the US and EU laws. They provide gov services for a ton of US DoD/NASA infra! China could and would just thumb their nose at us without much concern.
I'm less worried about what a Chinese surveillance device will do in my house than an Amazon one. Only the latter has the ability and history of turning over data to those who can arrest me.
One concern people should have about foreign tech spying on them is the possibility it undermines the stability of their jobs.
Let’s say it exfiltrates data that eventually allows a foreign competitor to build sophisticated metallurgy for turbines. It’s not like all foreign countries eagerly hire foreign talent, moreover it puts domestic expertise at risk as well as all the collateral subcontractors and suppliers… so, yeah, super metallurgy-guy's job may be secure (can get hired by the foreign competitor), even if the company collapses but not the jobs of 10,000s who work for suppliers, etc.
As an editorial, I support almost everything EFF and related orgs do, precisely to reduce the fear of US spying that makes China look like a better option (What a state of affairs!)
It seems your actual complaint is that if US Law Enforcement decides you are a target of interest, they would think to go to Amazon and Amazon's reputation is that they'd cooperate in handing over data, whereas the LE officers would neither bother to ask, nor expect cooperation from the Chinese companies.
The Chinese (or anyone) can certainly turn over their data to people who can arrest you, if they decide you are a target.
Chinese companies operating in the US still have to abide by US laws, so they are under the same jurisdiction that compels Amazon to turn over data to law enforcement. If Chinese companies don't comply, they get kicked out of the market.
China could easily turn that data over to American law enforcement if they wanted to see a person they considered a threat to them arrested but that person was outside of their jurisdiction.
It has not happened, does not mean that it could not happen. Chinese companies are automatically more cooperative than us companies because they are trained to cooperate in their home country already.
But so far I suppose the indigenous big tech spying apparatus has been effective enough to not need foreign operators help.
But the former is acquiring information that may lead to them blackmailing you and/or your loved ones into spying against your nation, which may lead to more than just an arrest.
Why does it have to be either? My comment was merely about leak of data to China. Whether it is non-existent or not is something I'd rather not find out.
It is after all a personal decision and to each their own.
The bar for China successfully leveraging some damaging information on a US citizen in the US is pretty high. Meaning they have to have something very damning against a person in a position of interest. Not impossible but narrow.
The bar for leveraging general information about a regular US citizen in the US by a company like Amazon or the US government is very, very low. One thing I see happening really soon (if not already) is such data being used by medical insurers to algorithmically decide your coverage and rates. Or for authorities to use to establish whatever pattern they want that can be damning even if circumstantial.
Looking around, all of this already happens in the US even without the help of an extra massive data collection net. From companies like Google or PayPal algorithmically locking you out of your critical digital identity, your paid services, your money with simply a boilerplate "sorry not sorry, don't let the door hit you on your way out", to authorities stealing all your neighbors' smart doorbell recordings to see what you have been doing and Stingraying the hell out of everyone on the off chance that they're going to catch the person they're looking for. Anything that makes that easier or opens up more avenues to do more of that is definitely going to be used (and abused) as such.
Had the same thought. Don't know what data iRobot collects, but perhaps its telemetry includes square footage of your rooms / house? (Amazon can use that to determine how wealthy you are). Attach an echo on that with microphone and camera, and the iRobot could even sneakily follow you and spy on you - Alexa always with you in your house, anywhere!
With Alexa, there is a manual hardware switch where you can turn off the microphones. With Echo Show, there is a manual hardware shutter for the camera.
I'm not sure if that is the answer to privacy concerns, but at least it is there.
When it comes to patents, I'm fine with that. Our system of patents has become a significant encumbrance to innovation and is causing US companies to fall behind.
> You are absolutely right, but I’m not sure I want to have a free roaming camera and LiDAR sensor from a Chinese company in my home. Absolute piss poor track record of data collection
I am not sure if Amazon is more trustworthy than that.
I mean there are countless documented situations where U.S. law enforcement has dramatically overreached or misstepped, and personally, I’d prefer people who have cameras and microphones in my home to require the U.S. judiciary to review some facts and agree to issue a warrant for any access. Amazon doesn’t meet this test and so this acquisition likely means we’ll be parting ways with iRobot equipment in our home.
I guess you could say my threat model is not “the United States is my adversary”, and more that I appreciate some checks and balances being present on ‘local yokel’ police departments which are empirically not always doing the right thing (especially where oversight is low).
Yup, that was my thinking, even if the Chinese company owns the data, they wont be sharing that with the PD or NSA , etc... if they are, then really doesn't matter who owns your data.
I don't really want continuous surveillance of the interior of my home by any company from any nation. There should be some places where you get to just exist without being monitored.
So far my solution has been just to make sure everything is disconnected from wifi. Not so sure that will actually work for that much longer, if it still does at all (cellular, more extensive mesh networking, etc.).
I think that places in the US will start having to push for the right to turn off and disconnect (yeah, shades of Max Headroom here).
But what is the difference, is the track record of a democracy less grim with your privacy? " Amazon admitted its Ring security cameras have sent recordings to police without the knowledge or consent of the people who own the cameras.
Responding to an inquiry from Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Amazon said in a letter dated July 1 that it has handed over private recordings to police 11 times in 2022. The company said it was complying with an "emergency request."
I guess is better to have a device that will share your data with domestic entities that actually spy on you and harm your privacy. If someone
"has to" own my data, I prefer that someone to be in another jurisdiction.
Is there a tangible difference between chinese and american companies when it comes to privacy? It seems either will sell your data to the highest bidder.
How easy are the Chinese models to repair? I can't speak for iRobot's mop bots, but the older model vacuums were insanely easy to repair. I had a motor die on one, and it was about ten phillips head screws to get to it, remove it, and pop in a $10 replacement. I was amazed to see a modern consumer item that was so easy to repair.
Of course, this is a model I bought used almost ten years ago. Not sure how similar current models are.
I can only speak about the Roborock S5, but I assume the newer ones are fairly comparable.
I once had it give me an error that the main fan (for suction) was broken. In this case, there was a small particle lunged into it, so it wouldn't spin. All it took was a little wiggle, and it spun again.
It's definitely more than 10 phillips head screws, but less than 30. I guess it depends which part broke, but I had to disassemble pretty much the whole thing. I can promise you that my repair skills or experiences are very novice, but I managed just fine. Had two screws left over after putting it all back together as is tradition, but I suppose they weren't mission critical, as this was like 3 years back and Dobby is still cleaning like a champ.
Like half a year ago, the LIDAR broke. Ordered a new one on amazon for 20 bucks, unscrewed now about 28 screws and exchanged the broken part. Put it all together, again tossed away a screw that left me wondering where it belonged, and it still works to this day.
This was a very long way of saying "Roborocks repair fairly easily, and there are numerous tutorials online."
Edit: BTW, Dobby has been cleaning for almost 500 hours now. At that price point, there is no cheaper hourly cleaning staff :)
I also have an S5. Had a LIDAR that wouldn't spin. Paid 15€ or so for an identical part on Amazon. It took 5 minutes and a single screwdriver to swap it.
At 5 minutes you were really quick! For me it was probably like 20-30, but like I said: it's not necessarily something I'm skilled at. Either way, repairs are fairly quick and easy!
I recently went from a Roomba S9+ to a RoboRock S7 MaxV Ultra and it was like night and day. The RoboRock has not gotten stuck on a single cat toy, cable, or sock yet. It doesn't bump into furniture repeatedly. It is considerably quieter. I feel like it is the first time I can actually safely start running a robot vacuum while not at home, and not worry that I'll come home to a robot tangled in some random object.
How does it avoid cables? I have an earlier Roborock version and while I love it and will defend it until the day it dies, I've found that cables are the absolute nemesis. Does your version have computer vision?
Pretty sure my version is a standard RoboRock S7, only with the "Ultra" base that also cleans the mop. I might have lucked out with the cables so far. Fwiw I do try to clean the floor of clutter a bit when I know I'm going to run it, but it has still encountered charging cables etc during the run. It's just taken a picture of them as "obstacles" and gone around them.
The part that makes it more expensive is the "Ultra" base. The unit itself with an equivalent base to that of my Roomba is about 200 USD less expensive than the Roomba where I live.
I sincerely desire to avoid having a mobile, internet connected device that equips many sensors and cameras in my home that is designed, manufactured and supported by a Chinese company.
Yes we totally can. Honestly, the idea of telemetry is general enough that it can and should be legislated. At the very least products should advertise that they produce telemetry when connected to the internet and have an option or have to distribute the knowledge of how to disable it.
What I don't understand is how iRobot, once an iconic innovator, could move so slow and innovate so little that Roborock, a company founded in 2014, could beat the shit out of iRobot.
We went from a "dumb" Eufy RoboVac 11 to a Roomba i3+ EVO 3550 and I honestly wish we stayed with the Eufy or done more research. I just assumed Roomba was like the gold standard of robot vacuums. Its had so many stupid issues including randomly lighting up and making sounds at night which wakes me up since its in our bedroom. I haven't talked to their support because honestly I'm sure it'll be like all other consumer electronics and they'll just waste my time running through BS troubleshooting steps and not actually fix anything
You can turn off the lights in the app. This was annoying me too. They added it as a feature recently. I think the idea is that you know your Roomba is docked correctly and charging if the light is flashing
I can second this. Roborock was already years ahead when we bought ours (3 years ago?) and when I look at what their latest models can do it's pretty clear that Roomba forgot to invest into new technologies.
Maybe they are buying the brand, more than the tech. I bought an amazon basics vac for something like 60 USD which just stole the design of the latest cheap vac, so presumably can plunder the more advanced models too, once the market is ready for them.
What about effectiveness of the vacuuming? That's where Roomba is superior afaik, and the feature is pretty essential since you buy them to clean floors and carpet, not to delight you with the smoothest navigation.
Does it still double as a poop spreader or did they finally add a sensor for that?
As a former roomba owner, the issue I always had was that it was pretty terrible about coverage. The random walk it did often left large areas vacuumed as it had no sense of where it had and had not vacuumed.
Your information is many years out of date. The latest model maps your house (and has been doing so for a long time), uses a camera to identify and avoid obstacles including poop, and automatically empties its bin.
It’s crazy tho, even the cheapest roborock w/ LiDAR smokes every roomba out there. It’s hard to justify the more expensive models unless but the advanced feature sets are tempting.
That's exactly what makes this a good acquisition, right? Roomba has the brand/trademark recognition in the US and solid marketshare but a stagnant product, which iRobot apparently does not have the expertise needed to keep improving. For Amazon that should be a pretty straightforward technical/ML problem to solve to get back to the forefront of where Xiaomi, Ecovacs, etc. are.
> will probably be out offering integration with home plumbing to avoid any manual intervention for months at a time.
I can't even get a chicken waterer to work for months at a time, no way I'd let a robot access. Even so, is it so bad to let China take the lead, western design can go on vacay and rip off the results when they get back!
> can go on vacay and rip off the results when they get back
You can clone the design if there's capital left after consumers have been buying the competitor for years, but can you clone the manufacturing process or price as easily when you're years behind?
We see with Qualcomm CPUs and Android phones - the internals are still a few years behind iPhone after about a decade, and Apple still takes the lions share of profits in the phone market.
What’s the repair story? I have one of the earlier vacuum Roombas (620, bought 8 years ago, before most advancements happened), and I can still find both 1st and 3rd party replacement parts and repair almost everything myself.
I have a Roborock S4 and I love the thing (though I want to upgrade to a mopping one at some point)
But on the S4 I find sometimes it underperforms with navigation: it ends up relying on the bumpers and it smashes into table and desk legs even though the lidar should give it a heads-up (the legs are visible on the map it creates).
I'm wondering if it updates the map as it cleans but only _uses_ the updated map once the current clean is finished. Hmmmm
> Meanwhile, iRobot still hadn’t figured out how to make an effective stand-alone mop bot, much less an auto fill station or combined bot that actually works
But then maybe that's where the synergy is. Amazon is probably ahead of everyone on the planet with machine vision. They have the Amazon Go shops, and nobody else has anything that comes close. If they take iRobot's robotics knowledge and couple it with their own machine learning expertise, who will be able to compete with them?
It had better be truly amazing, it's 4x the price I paid for my old Roomba 780 many a year ago that did a decent job of it until it died after 5-6 years of service.
Do you know how they work on tile? I see everyone recommend for wood flooring, but my house is mainly a textured tile. Things like a regular vacuum make loud clanks rolling over and between them. Wondering if a robovac would even work, or get stuck, or just be obnoxiously loud rolling around. Anyone know?
> a mopping vacuum bot with actual rotating mop scrubbers, AI vision obstacle avoidance, LIDAR mapping, and most importantly fully automated water fill & mop pad cleaning at the base station.
And here I am using a broomstick 5 min every day... I feel like we're going to hit the great filter pretty soon
> We just got an Ecovacs X1 Omni - a mopping vacuum bot with actual rotating mop scrubbers, AI vision obstacle avoidance, LIDAR mapping, and most importantly fully automated water fill & mop pad cleaning at the base station
Well for 1500 Eur it better does all of it and even more
Does mop pad really work? I only have roborock with no fancy mop pad cleaning base station but ignoring that all it does is dragging a wet cloth around. I don't see that helping much
My previous bot was a "wet mop pad" Ecovacs model without any of the bells and whistles, and it was pretty worthless. I got the X1 Omni specifically because it has dual rotating scrubbers, self-clean/dry, and self-fill. Night and day difference. I feel like I could eat off the floor every morning.
Does the list of obstacles these things avoid include pet accidents like poop, cat puke, etc? Cause we have a pukey cat and a robo vac might make things much much worse.
It will steer around the rug automatically I think, and you can mark the rug locations as no-go zones or no-mop zones. The Roborock is better for mixed floor types because it will actually raise the mop up to vacuum in no-mop zones. The X1 needs to have the mop removed manually to do a vacuum-only pass.
So what if China knows what’s in your house? If American companies know what’s in your house the government can ask them for that info at any time and as Amazon has shown they’ll give it up without a warrant. The Chinese government isn’t coming to my house and I doubt Chinese companies are dealing with the us government like Amazon is.
How does that compare to the Chinese government having a map of your house at all? Honestly though, if the livestream was only viewable in China I’d be fine. Certainly much more comfortable with that than it being viewable in the us.
Meanwhile, iRobot still hadn’t figured out how to make an effective stand-alone mop bot, much less an auto fill station or combined bot that actually works. Roborock and Ecovacs products launch in China 6-12 months before their US launch. By the time Roomba has a decent mop bot, the X2 or X3 will probably be out offering integration with home plumbing to avoid any manual intervention for months at a time.
EDIT: commenters are asking what works offline from Roborock / Ecovacs. For the self-cleaning-mop generation like the X1 Omni:
- Roborock obstacle avoidance is local, but works better with cloud.
- Roborock can be controlled by a local home automation server without internet access.
- Ecovacs obstacle avoidance requires cloud.
- Ecovacs control requires cloud.
I remembered these stats from a Youtube video that I can't find; probably in my partner's history since we watched reviews on the TV together.
I picked the X1 Omni over the Roborock because it has superior mopping performance on tile floors, but I think both would be good options. It seems like Roborock is more privacy compatible.