[SNAP]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Come back here.
Hey, come here.
Where are you going?
Hi.
Hey, Sue.
Hey, Jack.
How are you?
Good to see you.
Hey, Alex.
How's it going?
Hey, Jack.
Good to see you.
Great.
I love this place.
Yeah, this is our new robot vacuum lab.
It's less like a lab and more like a home.
And the reason we did that is that we put furniture
and obstacles that you would find in your home
so that we can see how the vacuums performed
in sort of a real-life setting.
And we've placed all the furniture in specific locations
and marked it with tape so that we
know if the robot vacuum has moved it
during the cleaning session.
This place looks so clean.
I guess the robot vacuums must be doing their job.
Well, you should have seen it before,
because one of the things we do is we put debris down
on the floor.
We measure an amount of debris, because we
want to be as consistent as possible.
And we use different types of debris, different sizes.
So there's cereal there that's large.
The rice is on the medium side.
And then we also have a fine powder that we use,
almost simulating dust.
If you want to take a knee with me, Jack--
Sure.
--I can show you how we set it up.
So this is one of our designated debris areas, where
we place the weighed amount of debris as evenly as possible
and try and keep it within the line.
We want to give each vacuum a level playing field,
so we weigh out the amount of debris we put on the floor.
And we let the vaccums roam around and pick them up,
and then we weigh the debris afterward.
And we do this multiple times and then
give scores to the vacuum for the amount that they pick up
and where they navigate.
So, Alex, do you want to give Jack a demonstration of what
these things can do?
Sure.
So this robot here actually has two spinning side brushes--
Hey.
--that has the potential to scatter the debris
and make a bigger mess than the original one.
Is it supposed to do that?
Ideally, you want the vacuum to pick up
the debris on the first pass, because you're not sure
if it's going to get a second or third pass over the debris
again--
Oh, I see--
--and pick up what it scattered.
Hey, so what's that plastic thing on top?
That didn't come with the vacuum, did it?
That's actually a tracking device
that we place on the vacuum to see how it navigates
throughout our course.
Tracking where our robot vacuum goes
will help Consumer Reports testers evaluate
which one may be right for you.
And it's Misha Kollontai's job to figure out how to track.
These communicate with anchors we
have scattered throughout the room.
Yeah, there's one over here and another one back there.
So how many anchors are there?
We use over a dozen scattered throughout the lab.
Those sensors around the room communicate with modules
on the robot vacuum, tracking where it is and isn't going.
This information is twofold.
It gives us an idea of how often a vac passes areas,
because if you have some sort of debris that was scattered,
you want to make sure it comes back.
Got it.
Second of all, it gives you an idea of whether
or not it missed certain areas, because obviously, you
don't want to find out later on that your vacuum's never
going under your bed or under your couch
and finding patches of dirt there.
From all that data the sensors collect,
Misha can generate a funky looking map
of the robot vacuum's movement.
The brighter the color on the map,
the more the vacuum covered the area.
You can see here that this blue area right here was something
the vac never even got to.
In some cases, that's because there's furniture
blocking the vacuum's path.
Other times, it's because the vacuum missed that spot.
Oh, I see.
And the yellow ones is probably where
it spent most of its time, and the deep reds,
it's little time.
Right.
This one looks a little random, as you can see.
It's kind of bouncing all over the place.
Yeah.
And a lot of the time, when you see areas
that it covered a lot of times, that's not by design.
It might just be that it kept bouncing off of things
and staying in one spot.
Some robotic vacuums clean in a grid-like pattern,
while others use a random route.
The pattern the robot uses doesn't really
matter, as long as it cleans what you want.
How does a vacuum know where to go?
The vacuums use various sensors.
Some of them are smarter.
Some of them are dumber.
The dumb ones tend to just run in a straight line
until they bounce into something,
and then they'll turn and go somewhere else.
The smarter ones have additional sensors,
whether it be sonar or even cameras,
in some cases, that help it actually map your room as it's
going around.
And so they get smarter as they go along.
So ultimately, which is the best one of these robotic vacuums?
That depends on what you're looking for.
If what you're looking for is efficiency,
you might be looking for the structured system that goes up,
down, up, down, until it covers everything.
If you don't really care about how long it's out there,
randomize might be the way to go because you're
more likely to cover everything multiple times.
Sue, I've learned so much.
But I have one big question.
What's that?
Should I actually buy a robotic vacuum?
The cons of these are that they're really
just maintenance tools for in between cleanings
with your vacuum.
So they're really not going to get the deep-down dirt
in your carpet.
What features should I be looking for?
Some sort of edge-cleaning tool or side
brush so that they can get the edges and corners of a room.
You may want a remote control so that you
can control them remotely.
You may want some that have apps so that you can automatically
start it from another location.
Say, if you're at work or something, and you're like,
oh, you know, people are coming over.
I'd like to clean my house.
And then when you get home, hopefully it's
all clean for you.
Are these very expensive to own?
We found some models around the $200
price range that do pretty well.
They may not have the bells and whistles
of the models that are $1,000.
But they may bounce around randomly and get the job done.
I think I might actually buy one of these.
Thanks.
Great.
I'm happy to help.
Stop by anytime.
Did you leave the door open?
I did.
I think one got away.
Oh, no.
[SNAP]