This area is advancing at an incredible pace (in China). Roborock and ECOVACS (Xiaomi) advertise bots with computer vision cameras that can recognize and steer around obstacles like cables, shoes, books. These products typically come to China 6 months to a year before they have a US/western release. I am excited for docking stations that fill and drain ionized water and clean the bot’s mopping pads like the Ecovacs X1 Omni [1], released in Sept 2021 in China and announced for US release in March.

And these features trickle down into low-end models quite quickly! 3-4 years ago a bot with LIDAR mapping, no-go zones, self-empty and 2-in-1 mopping were all quite expensive. Now you can get a good bot with those features for $500-ish from the midrange lines of these vendors. Watching the market feels a little like PC graphics in the early 2010s when vendors would release something twice as good every year for half the price.

Although, a Chinese friend of mine recommended I wait for a later high-end model, which supposedly allows the docking station to connect directly to water/sewage lines and avoid dealing with bags & refills (other than air filters) entirely.

[1] https://youtu.be/CQYUIVURDhk

I feel like you have to design your lifestyle with a Roomba in mind. For example, we have a hard floors in a single story flat. Perfect for a Roomba. But we also have a few area rugs with tassels on the ends. It would get snagged on the tassels so I would have to run around and collect the rugs before running the Roomba. Now I don't even bother; it just sits there charging because I can't trust it to run unsupervised.