★★★★★ 1
Fatal flaw
Color: White
We have this robot's dock in our kitchen, and off of the kitchen, 12 feet or so to the left of the dock, there is a step down into the family room. Even though the dock has been in the same location since we first unboxed this robot, and the robot knows it has not moved from the dock since it last "went home," the robot does an "establishing location" every time it leaves the dock for a new mission. More than half the time when it does this, it makes a beeline directly towards that family room step, and careens off of it. We've set up "no-go" zones, and an invisible wall, and everything else we can to make it avoid this hazard. As soon as it leaves the dock, it announces "establishing location", and proceeds to launch itself directly over the step. My wife has commented that we don't know why it's lost its will to live, as it certainly seems to attempt to self destruct regularly. I've had to rescue it from the bottom of the step so many times, emptying the dust bin on the cheap robot honestly feels like less work. When it does stop at the top of the step, and realizes it where it is, it announces "invisible wall or no-go zone detected. Please move robot." We'll take the robot back to the dock, restart it, and...there it goes again right off the step.
Our other complaint is how buggy the phone app is. Often times we'll have to completely close out of the app and reopen it multiple times to get the control screen of the robot to load, and things like selecting 1 or 2 passes, or the vacuum level, requires you to swipe to a different screen and back to be able to adjust the settings. Modifying the map to add no-go zones, pops a box somewhere far off the screen, requiring you to zoom way out, find it, and carefully drag it to the location you'd like it. If you happen to accidentally tap outside of the box, the box locks, you're no longer able to edit it, so you must delete it and start over again. It's like playing the old Operation board game. The Tuya Smart app that the cheap robot uses always worked flawlessly. You also can't disable its tendency to try to "jump" obstacles. We have a stationary bouncer for our child, with a flanged outer ring on its base. The robot will run up on this ramp and get stuck. It will then back up and Dukes of Hazard itself over the ring into the inner space. Once there, it can't get out, due to the vertical inner edge of the ring, so it cries for help after moving around under the bouncer for 20 minutes, trying to find an exit. I've established no-go zones for this, but we tend to move the bouncer to different areas in the house, depending on what we're doing, so we're left with sections of floor that don't get swept, and a stuck robot.
A firmware update to make the robot trust that the dock location, which is saved in the generated map, is valid until proven otherwise when leaving the dock would alleviate 99% of our frustration. The robot knows if it's been picked up or moved. Why it has to establish its location every single time a new "mission" is initiated, when it returns and leaves from a fixed point on the saved map every time makes zero sense. When my wife's frustration leads her to donate this to the local thrift store, we'll be looking at a different manufacturer than roborock.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2025