Roomba vs. Rulo, the latest robot vacuum cleaner showdown!

Robot vacuum cleaner's sense of direction test!

　The first thing we did was when we used the robot vacuum cleaner in the living room, what kind of trajectory did the vacuum cleaner draw and how did the room move? It is a test to see if it cleans up like this and returns to the charging base.

Chair legs that robot vacuum cleaners are not good at. In this test, it was excluded from the test because it could get stuck and make it impossible to drive, or the location information could be messed up. Robot vacuum cleaners are fine with a four-legged chair, but they are not very good at using a long, thin piece of wood about 1cm thick lying on the floor as shown in the photo. or cause you to lose your way.

In addition, the robot vacuum cleaner can easily get caught in small, unfixed items such as bath mats and kitchen mats. Therefore, the chair and the kitchen mat are removed from the room and the experiment is conducted.

　The prepared robot vacuum cleaners are top-of-the-line models from each manufacturer. The Roomba 980 from iRobot and the 3rd generation Rulo (MC-RS800) from Panasonic. Both can work with smartphones. In addition to being able to operate with the app, you can also check the cleaning report.

　First, let's have a look at Rulo's cleaning scene.

Rulo 1st time Rulo 2nd time

　The characteristic is that it first turns around the outline of the room in the counterclockwise direction. This will memorize the rough shape of the room. It then travels in a rectangle inside the contour, sweeping the entire floor as if it were a coloring book. I drove it twice and didn't see any difference in its behavior.

Rulo's dedicated app lets you see how it moves around the room and how much trash it picks up. It can be seen that the shape of the room is correctly recognized. The fixed point camera captures the map from the right side to the left

　Next, when we look at the movement of the Roomba, it's movement is completely different from that of Rulo. First, clean the entire room in a rectangular shape (left and right when viewed in the image). I was exploring the shape and size of the room, as well as what seemed to be obstacles. After cleaning the entire room, it runs along the outline and rasterizes in a different direction to clean.

Roomba 1st Roomba 2nd

Rulo's standard cleaning mode cleans the floor only once, while Roomba cleans the same area twice vertically and horizontally. Therefore, the cleaning time is about 10 minutes longer than Rulo. Rulo also has a careful mode that cleans the same place twice.

　You can check the map of the cleaned area in the app with the Roomba. The results are as below.

Rumba holding down the characteristics of the shape of the room more than Rulo. The diagonal part of the TV stand in the upper right and the shape of the cat tower in the lower right are wonderful!

　If the shape of the floor or room is recognized as blocks, it will be a map like Rulo, but in the case of Roomba this It looks like they are trying to determine the shape of the room more accurately by deriving vector information based on the information.