Neato BotVac Connected review: A LIDAR-powered robot vacuum is my maid now

The Neato BotVac Connected.

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It's been about two months since I've vacuumed my house, and the floor has never been cleaner. That's because I haven't been doing it—a robot has. For the past two months we've had a Neato BotVac Connected rolling around the house, the latest robo vac in Neato's lineup. Like all Neato robots, this has a spinning LIDAR unit that maps out the house. In this new "Connected" version, it's got Wi-Fi and a smartphone app.

The household name in household robots is definitely iRobot's Roomba, a round robotic vacuum cleaner that popularized the idea of having a little bot clean up after you. The fundamentals of the Roomba haven't changed much since its introduction: it's a vacuum on motorized wheels with a bumper plate in the front. When the plate bumps into something, the robot knows it hit an obstacle and changes directions. Start a Roomba on floor and usually it will spiral outward until it hits a wall, try to feel out the perimeter of the room, and then ping pong all across the center of the house in an attempt to cover the interior space.

Most Roombas can't "see." Its only window to the outside world is the little bumper plate—it feels its way around a space by running into stuff. Roomba will say it takes this limited information and runs it through an algorithm to be a little smarter than "randomly driving around," but to the human eye, there's little logic to where the little disk is driving.

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