iRobot Roomba e5158
Robot vacuum
Question about iRobot Roomba e5158
We bought this robot about a month ago. Unfortunately, it rarely finds its way back to the home base (even though our flat has less than 80m2 to clean, but admittedly our flat is a bit angled). The suction power would be fabulous, but it is extremely tedious to carry the robot back to the home base after almost every cleaning... Even repositioning the Homebase several times did not bring any improvement. Most of the time, the robot wanders around in a single room in the last half hour of battery power and can't seem to find its way out (are non-rectangular corners a problem at best?). Unfortunately, the time window (when the robot should start looking for the home base) cannot be set for automatic vacuuming. So we have to start the robot manually every time (only for 30 minutes so that there is enough time to search for the home base). Is there any solution to this problem? The Homebase is clearly visible in the flat and we have tried different locations.
I think in such special situations only a robot hoover with a LIDAR laser navigation system would help. These robot hoovers can be recognised by the small tower in which the laser rotates continuously, tracks the map of the rooms and, of course, also finds the way back to the docking station absolutely perfectly and in every case. It knows where it has been and where it has to go. Cleaning is systematic and not random.
The iRobot Roomba does not use a laser navigation system for orientation and therefore cannot find its way around the room as accurately. More expensive iRobot hoovers can still orient themselves with the help of ToF sensor cameras, which in principle also works, but very often not. The iRobot Roomba e5158 model, however, has nothing that helps with navigation, it works according to the random principle and this unfortunately leads to the robot searching for the docking station in the flat as described, sometimes with success and often unfortunately not. The small transparent round sensor element at the top of the robot is used for this purpose, with which it tries to detect signals from the charging station via infrared.
I would recommend replacing the robot (possibly sell it here at Digitec), e.g. with a Xiaomi or Roborock model with LiDAR laser navigation system. The Xiaomi model Dreame 9 has such a navigation system and costs the same but can reliably find its way back to the charging station (and also has a wet wipe function):
Xiaomi Dreame D9