Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Bear with me, there's a lot to cover here, but I don't want anyone else to waste their time and money on a roomba until the manufacturer solves the myriad of problems they have. The hardwood floors in my apartment get dirty and covered in pine needles every day while living in the Pacific Northwest. I figured I could save the multiple sweeping jobs per week with a roomba, and even turn it on remotely while I'm at work. Turns out I spent more time supervising the damn thing than I ever did sweeping in the first place. I highly recommend waiting until these robots have more capable sensors and programming before buying one. Here's why: I fully understood that my 2-bedroom apartment would need to be "clean" in order for a roomba to not get hung up on stuff like cords or other random stuff on the floor. RUGS: In my apartment I have a few small rugs near the exterior doors and also a bathmat near the shower, with the remainder being hardwood floors. The roomba has flipped up a corner and gotten hung up on all but one rug. CORDS: I knew that thin power cords like a phone cord would need to be well out of reach before letting the roomba go at it. Turns out it will not only get hung up on even beefy cords from the likes of a power strip, but it will get caught ON ITS OWN CORD, pulling the docking station around in the process. I used a rubber band to consolidate its own cord, but it will still move the dock around when it hits the cord. CLOTHES: You can't have ANY clothing on the floor or the roomba will drag it around or get hung up on it. TABLES/CHAIRS: It hits things HARD. It is not the delicate tap you'd expect. When its sensors see a wall or something large, it slows down before contact, but it can't sense anything narrower like a table leg or chair, which it will hit with considerable force. It moves my dining room chairs around, and they're made of hardwood. I have a cheaper, lightweight ikea table in the living room that it bumps around like it's barely there. This thing WILL knock stuff off of your tables and haphazardly rearrange your furniture if it's chair-sized or smaller. If you have small wastebaskets around, you can expect them to be knocked over. THE "KEEPOUT ZONE" MONUMENT: The 2 foot radius function works well. I put it between two bedroom doors, as that's where the socks and delicate phone cords live. The 10 foot straight beam function, however, doesn't work as claimed. It functions as both a beam AND a 2 foot radius keepout zone. With the monument set to beam mode, the roomba stops approaching it from behind when it's a couple feet away. It would be nice if it worked so I could allow the roomba to clean one bedroom but not the other. Also, the actual beam is probably 18+ inches wide only a few feet out from the monument. THE APP / REMOTE CAPABILITY: The app would be a redeeming feature, as the layout and user interface are very well designed. Kudos. However, it fails to remotely connect with the roomba probably 50% of the times I've tried. I've gone through and done every single suggestion in the help section and finally just hard reset the wifi connection, only to have the problem come up again the next day. The dock/roomba is in an area with a strong wifi signal, full bars according to my phone. Not being able to remotely turn on the roomba defeats the whole purpose, as I'm not gonna try to cook or watch tv with this noisy robot crashing into stuff around my apartment. THE PROGRAMMING / MACHINE LEARNING: It's awful. In fact, I'm not convinced that it does any machine learning whatsoever. I thought that this thing would learn the layout of my apartment and at least *kind of* know its way around. In actuality, it behaves more like a game of Pong, but dumber. When it comes into contact with objects or walls, it turns around and veers off in a seemingly random direction. It can take the thing 20 minutes to find its way out of my wide open dining room due to just 4 chairs and a table. I moved the dock from the dining room to near the front door (less obstacles nearby and I could run it for only a few minutes if I just wanted to triage the shoe area which gets the dirtiest). When you press the "home" button either on the app or on the roomba itself, it does not actually try to find its way home. It just continues vacuuming unless it happens to get within maybe 2 feet of the dock, when it then homes itself. On the occasions when it has kept vacuuming for 20+ minutes after commanding it to return to the home base and I finally picked it up and dropped it off at home, it pulls in, docks, and then plays a triumphant tune to let you know it has successfully returned to the dock. How insulting. I gave this thing plenty of time to "learn" the layout of the apartment. Its path seems completely random. If it misses the home dock from a couple feet away while searching for it, and veers off into another portion of my small apartment until it randomly careens back towards the dock 20 minutes later. More often than not, it will completely neglect cleaning certain areas while cleaning some of the same areas 5 or more times in a single session. It also will not vacuum within about 18 inches of the dock except for the straight line path it takes when it finally decides to home itself. THE PHYSICAL DESIGN: It has a bumper bar on the front that appears to be able to measure a collision in 3 axes. It also has a post protruding from the top where I assume the infrared sensor lives for communicating with the dock and the keepout zone monument. I have two areas in my apartment where the roomba's main body height can pass under except for the protruding IR sensor on top. This sensor crashes into my tv stand very hard, since the IR sensor hits before the bumper. This also allows the robot to go under the edges of my lower kitchen cabinets but then get stuck there by the protruding sensor. The rotating brush that pulls debris away from the wall works fine against a wall, but does NOT get into corners as it claims. Just looking at the geometry from the top down will show you this. Overall very disappointed with what I thought was a cool product that would save me lots of time. Even if I could get the app to turn the thing on while I'm at work, I don't think I'd trust it to not knock stuff off of tables, scuff up my floors trying to free itself from getting stuck, or catch a thread and completely unravel a sock. If your home is a perfectly square room with literally no furniture, rugs, cords, or other items on the floor, a roomba can save you time cleaning. If that's your situation though, you probably have other priorities more important than shopping for a robot vacuum to clean your meth house. For everyone else, I suggest you wait a year or three for iRobot's engineering team to put out a product that's worth more than its weight in swamp water. I'm starting the return process for this thing right now. I really, REALLY wanted to like this thing. It would pay for itself in a few months if it could reliably clean even 80% of my apartment and save me from sweeping several times a week. I really hope iRobot's engineers can address all of these issues so I can give roomba another shot. In the mean time, this thing belongs in an R&D lab, not flailing hopelessly around my apartment until I get tired of the noise and physically pick it up to put it on the dock.