Frankly, I don’t think these things have made much progress in the last ten years.

The iRobot isn’t like that at all, but it’s not like that in general. There are countless videos on YouTube doing all sorts of tests and many of these things fall right through the ice. They don’t suck half of it, and they still cause pet accidents all over half the house despite the “detection” and they still get stuck on the legs of the slanted chair.

We currently have an Ecovacs at home, it works fine, but in the dark it literally gets lost and in the morning it beeps in the middle of the room. Vacuuming during the day works fine, but I think vacuuming is a good thing. It’s not a great model, but I think that spending 1500 euros for such a device is not commensurate with the comfort you should get from it.

These Switchbot ones have made the most progress in that they can bring their own water and get fresh water using a kind of double dock, if you’ve ever had the trouble of drilling holes in your kitchen baseboards to connect to the water pipe and drain. Plus, they can rinse and dry their mop so that after 3 weeks you don’t feel like you just mopped the floor with a wet dog. This seems to work well, but I don’t have that from personal experience.

Vacuuming usually works well enough to keep the “walking” area reasonably clean. Every now and then, you’ll really have to grab your good old Miele to get through all the nooks and crannies, sofas and chairs. You can’t avoid that. But for keeping track of everyday things, it works well and can at least save you some time.