Round 2 starts: Roborock vs Yeedi vs DreameBot
Today I start the second round of corporate robot vacuum battles. I would like to have had the ILIFE A11 in the mix, but I just got an RMA for it so it’s out of contention for the next few weeks. My belief with the A11 is that a wire disconnected to the main brush motor. Everything else on it seemed to operate fine. Things happen.
Update August 9, 2022: That was short, stopping this round as it’s just not fair- the Yeedi has decided to completely give up. 5 random error messages a night involving that the bag is full (it’s not,) the wheels are stuck (they’re not,) the unit is off the ground (it’s not,) and then it got stuck in a hallway that had nothing blocking it. Watched it struggle. It’s just not in it. The DreameBot D10 can’t handle a floor of the size it’s working on without centrally locating the charging station, and that can’t happen at the moment (will in about a week.) So cancelling round 2 until we get the A11 back.
In the building the robots are regularly getting picked up and placed in people’s offices to clean. This has been a weird thing for me as I get notifications that the wheels are suspended and when I look at a map it’s not an area the robot is familiar with.
The DreameBot D10, winner of the last round, moves up to floor 2. The Yeedi Vac 2 Pro that’s become known as the great honking giraffe for some reason stays on 3 and will continue not finding the charger and mapping incorrectly until I have a worthy successor. And we’re adding a Roborock S7 MaxV Ultra to the mix on the first floor in an attempt to mop and vacuum a huge area nightly.
Yeah, this will mostly be a head to head on the D10 and MaxV. I can’t imagine the Yeedi will get better unless they release a firmware to address the year+ old issues. This is entirely programming related, it could be so good, but it’s not.
The MaxV Ultra comes (in this configuration,) with a docking station that reloads the water tank, and washes the mop pad after use. So hopefully we’ll have a situation where the laminate floors are getting clean. I mean drag mops did dragging, but 200+ people a day walking in an area tend to be a lot more than a drag mop can handle and I was washing a filthy mop pad every single day.
The ILIFE A11 is boxed up in the MaxV Ultra’s box and heading to ILIFE for an RMA in the weirdest robot vacuum flex I have ever pulled. Someone threw away my ILIFE box, I’m not just being a vac jerk… but “here, here’s your broken robot in a competitor’s box”.
I already have one clear winner in the fast mapping category, and that’s the S7 MaxV Ultra. It beat the DreameBot D10’s mapping time for more area by about 22 minutes, and as the Yeedi can’t complete a map that’s accurate it’s on somewhere around 4 weeks at this point. This is probably only an issue or selling point for you if, like me, you have to escort a robot around the office building for an hour to make sure nobody trips on it while it’s mapping for tonight’s mopping.
If I can swap the Yeedi out it’s going… it’s been an interesting failure on so many levels but I don’t have a replacement.
I asked Shark and Roomba’s PR if they were interested in this round and have not heard back. Pocketables is small potatoes however, so it’s not like they’re afraid of competition or anything (taunting noises.)
Once again, it should be noted that the corporate environment these are in should be considered easy mode. There aren’t cables, cats, poop, etc. That being said after the last few weeks with the first round I can tell you there are things you never expect, such as the soul-stealing chairs, someone positioning a planter in just the right way to create a robot trap, etc.
It should also be noted that while all these robot vacuums have resume cleaning mode for when they run low on charge, this is not something that most will ever use. We use it nightly on all three floors at least once if not twice a night. Cleaning operations take 3+ hours generally, but most vacuums on high only can power through an hour.
These will be rode hard and put up wet. If you’ve got anything you’re interested in seeing on my tests, drop me a line.
