Move over, Tesla: Robot vacuums roll out with self-driving tech

The new do-everything Roborock Qrevo Curv maps your home, vacuums and hot-mops. And then it tidies up for next time.
When the first Roomba robot vacuums showed up for work in 2002, they felt their way around the house by bumping into walls, chair legs — even us. It wasn’t sophisticated. But it got the job done. Eventually.
Robot vacs coming available today are far more sophisticated and self-contained, with high-tech sensors and cameras to avoid pets, cords, chairs and other obstacles. They also hot-mop tile, wood and other smooth surfaces. And they maintain themselves, emptying the dust filter, cleaning and drying mops as well as heating and filling the reservoir.
I’ve been testing the Qrevo Curv, an advanced robot vacuum ($1,599.99) just now coming available from Roborock, a leader in this very competitive, fast-moving market. I’m amazed to see how automated vacuuming, mopping and maintenance has become.
Plus, the Curv’s unique side-by-side brushes funnel pet hair and other potential vacuum-jamming messes between them. It’s also got the most powerful robovac suction available, by a long shot. And it’s got a trove of lifting and extending capabilities to reach and clean just about any floor of any house.
And then there’s the navigation system.
Robot vacuums increasingly adopt navigation technology found in most automobiles with self-driving and advanced driver assist systems, or ADAS, technology.
Most ADAS-capable automobiles rely on a mix of navigation technologies to identify and avoid obstacles in any environment, including:
· Radar, or radio waves to help identify obstacles at long range, in any weather, day or night.
· Ultrasonic, or sound waves for self-parking and other short-range situations, in any weather, day or night.
· Lidar, or laser beams, for high-precision, short- and medium-range object identification, in fair weather, day or night.
· Vision systems, which capture the most complete picture of short- and medium-range environments but can be challenged by poor weather and low-light conditions.
Not all carmakers build navigation systems with multiple inputs, despite the obvious benefits. Specifically, Tesla deploys only vision-based navigation. And this week, the company plans to continue relying solely on cameras when it releases the Cybertaxi in a few years. It’s one of the reasons the automaker has attracted unwanted attention from regulators.
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Increasingly, Roborock and other robot vac makers are opting for multi-input navigation, even though the bar for safety and accuracy is dramatically lower than for automakers. Rather, they’re adding more navigation technologies to help boost coverage, increase accuracy and create new features.
Roborock’s PreciSense, the navigation system inside the Curv, employs lidar to map your home, design efficient cleaning routes and identify obstacles. It also includes a camera with a built-in spotlight to help clarify whether a cat-shaped obstacle, for example, is actually a pet and not a life-sized figurine.
Roborock claims to be the only robot vac maker with certified security and privacy safeguards. But if that’s not good enough for you, the connected camera features are disabled by default. So don’t turn them on.
PreciSense isn’t even Roborock’s most advanced navigation and mapping tech. Another new model, the Qrevo Slim, includes its next-generation StarSight system. StarSight features multiple lasers for 3D mapping to add depth precision for more efficient routes and streamlined obstacle avoidance.
The Curv, named for the base’s igloo-like contours, isn’t exactly off-road ready. But its three wheels raise and lower independently to nail the best possible approach to door thresholds, tile-to-carpet transitions and other height changes. I watched with amusement as the Curv climbed our Fitbit scale and cleaned the surface.
The mops also tuck inside the undercarriage to keep carpets dry while vacuuming.
The Qrevo Curv is the most powerful vacuum I’ve found, by far. It boasts 18,500 Pascals, the metric that suction-measuring types use for comparison. You can control the force in the Roborock app, opting for lower-power everyday cleaning and full-on mode for flower-pot spills and other one-off emergencies.
The dual-brush system seems to work well. It hasn’t ever gotten stuck choking on hair — or anything, really. The vacuum and mop extenders clean right up to the baseboards. Navigation’s also been impressive, albeit not without a few minor mishaps. The Curv successfully avoids some cable nests, but snags others — mostly by unintentionally disrupting the nest it’s trying to work around. I’ve also had to rescue the Curv after it wedged itself under a kitchen table chair. The legs of our other chairs seem to be spaced far enough apart to allow for easy escapes or close enough together to force the Curv around. But not the kitchen chairs.
I deeply wish we had a pet to test the avoidance system. Molly, our 14-and-a-half-year-old German Shepherd/Chow Chow mix heartbreakingly died this summer. But there was still plenty of hair to vacuum.
Once the house is mapped, you can identify different rooms in the Roborock app and then send the Curv out to clean one. The app insists on 90-degree angles, but the transition between our kitchen and living room is 45 degrees. So the Curv ends up vacuuming a triangular sliver of living-room carpet during kitchen vac-and-mops.
It’s fine, though. Because the Curv’s dual-input navigation ensures that the kitchen-adjacent carpeting never gets mopped. Day or night.
USA TODAY columnist Mike Feibus is president and principal analyst of FeibusTech, a Scottsdale, Arizona, market research and consulting firm. Reach him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @MikeFeibus.
The views and opinions expressed in this column are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of USA TODAY.