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...