Life with a robot, hope everyone is doing as good as possible, I was thinking about this for years, and yes one online vendor made extremely easy with small installments that I decided to take the step, I will not share brand or vendor, but I want to share the experience and I am posting the link to the video that tipped the scale here, the guy is good.
The learning curve was not as bad as I expected, no assembly necessary, once the unit arrived was a matter to charge, and let it learn the house, two days later, couple of cleaning the bins later, YEAH it mapped the house, I even learned to use the mapping system to map NO GO zones inside you house.
The biggest warning is charging cables, and since I watched some great videos about it, I tool the extra step make sure the area does not have any cable on the floor, it will not be a good experience, keep those charging cables away.
Growing up in the 70/80s, whenever I saw a cleaning robot I always thought about the movie with the KISS Vocalist – Gene/Magnum – Tom (1984), and I normally would pass. But I had this purchase in my wish list forever. So far my robot has not tried to kill me, but I keep an eye on her, yes you have to pick a name when you install the app, so I picked something cute, Robot 1, still too scary for me, and yes you can pick a male name for yours.
You can let the robot clean your home at one pass, but depending on the size, it will take some bin cleaning and could get in a way of your schedule, so in my experience, let the full house mapping go for as long as it needs, my took around 3/4 hours, some recharging and bin cleaning happened in between. Once the house map (using a phone app) was completed, I could divide the house in sections, I tried the scheduler but the app wanted to leave 3 hour space between cleaning, so I dropped and instead a saved “Jobs” and you get a button for “Living Room” “Kitchen” etc.
Yes you can connect with Alexa, but the reviews/experiences are mixed, for now I control with the phone app. Have fun, and just in case keep that baseball bat handy:-).
