Vacuum with legs puts new spin on doing the chores

Robot vacuums are developing new capabilities at a rapid pace. And while each leap isn’t enough to justify upgrading to an entirely new (and very expensive) model, they’re adding up in a way that makes current high-end devices significantly more useful and adaptable than those of three years ago.

Dreame’s X50 Ultra, which will arrive in Australia next month with a price tag of $3000, is the most impressive model yet. Expanding on the already excellent X40, with its self-cleaning and detachable mop pads, the new model adds more suction, hotter water, descaling, hot-air mop drying, self-adjusting detergent mixing, UV sterilisation and more competent obstacle detection.

And those are just the basic improvements; the X50 also adds some completely new hardware to help it adapt to particular elements in the home.

For kitchens and bathrooms where grime gets trapped in corners and along edges, the mop pads are mounted on new mechanical arms that can swing out to scrub the hard-to-reach places. For getting in under couches and furniture, the robot can lower its sensor tower into its body to make itself fit.

And if you have raised floors, room transitions, sliding door tracks or even a stiff carpet robots usually bump up against, you can make use of the X50’s “Pro Leap” system; a pair of rotating legs with wheels attached that helps the device overcome these obstacles.

New appendages

This is the second robot I’ve tested with this kind of climbing ability, though the X50 and Roborock’s Qrevo Edge approach the problem differently. Roborock’s model lifts its frame up and brute forces itself up and over with the help of a little wheel at the front of the robot, whereas the X50 lifts itself on the legs and puts its chin over the step, rotating the legs so it lands on the higher level.

For extra safety on sliding-door tracks and the like, you can set it to step with one foot at a time so it doesn’t fall on its face. The system was very smooth and dependable for mounting the four-centimetre tripping hazard between the tiled and carpeted area of my home, after one brief hiccup.

While the Edge identified the transition on its own and blasted over it, the X50 didn’t even try to climb when it was performing its initial mapping run, bumping futilely against the tiles until I picked it up. Once I had it back in its charging dock, however, the app opened the map of my house and explained that I could manually add passable thresholds, and once I did so it passed them easily.

This is surely a safety feature; since the robot will disregard some of its usual fall prevention sensors when climbing, it’s possible it could try to jump near some stairs and take a tumble. But the caution does also make the Pro Leap system a little less useful. If the robot hits a climb that you haven’t specifically highlighted on the map, it won’t surmount it. I tested this by throwing a three-centimetre tall rug down where it wasn’t expecting it; it gave up when it couldn’t find a way around.

The app explains the two leg settings.

That said, the system does mean the robot can traverse my entire home, where many cannot. Dreame says the leap works on heights up to 4.2 centimetres, or six centimetres for two-stage thresholds, which is the highest of any robot yet. If you have higher, you can also put down a makeshift ramp and mark it in the map.

The leaping ability will clearly lead people to wonder if we’re close to a robot that can climb stairs, but I think I’m safe in saying that’s a little while off. The risk of falling backwards would be too great unless the unit knew the exact height and spacing, and it would need to be smaller than current robots. Plus, carrying the robot would still probably be faster.

Another nifty trick is the X50’s ability to lower its LIDAR sensing unit into its main body, meaning it can squeeze under furniture. It isn’t much of an advantage in real terms given the X50 is one of the chunkier robots you’ll find — lowering the sensors means it’s still nine centimetres tall — but if your couch or TV unit has enough clearance it’s a handy feature.

Solid fundamentals

None of the flashy tricks would be worth much if the robot didn’t nail the cleaning, but thankfully it’s been rock solid in my few weeks of testing. Suction is powerful but not especially noisy, mopping got the job done without leaving drips or puddles, and a new dual roller system seems to have eliminated the problem of hair strangling the mechanism (though it’s not as satisfying as the X40’s sold-separately hair-shredding roller).

As usual for this kind of robot, it has two water tanks and a filter bag installed in the home base, and it comes and goes as needed to wet its pads, empty its dust bin or clean itself, and have the dirty water sucked into a tank. There’s an automatic setting that will decide how to do all this based on what it knows about your house, but there are also plenty of nitty-gritty settings to make it more consistent. For example, the robot can remove and attach its own mop pads, so you might like to set it so that it does all the carpeted areas first, then comes home to get the pads to do the tiles. It can lift the mop pads to go over carpet, but they only lift by around a centimetre, so I like to avoid that just to be safe.

The base is large, but it minimises a few human tasks.

There are also plenty of options to govern things like the hot water self-cleaning (up to 80 degrees), the drying, the suction power and the mopping strategies, so you can balance power usage with efficacy. Though, in my tests, the robot had enough juice to do the whole house on one charge in around an hour with just about everything turned on. Some new settings relate to the robotic mop arms, which can reach into corners. You can set the robot to put them under the fridge and rotate its body to get in nice and far, or on the other hand you can tell it to only use them once a week to save the battery.

With its self-cleaning abilities, a large filter bag and the ability to dispense its own detergent, the only regular task you have once it’s all set up is filling one water tank and emptying another, a task which will probably be eliminated in the coming years with attachments for water mains and sinks. Otherwise, you could go months without having to do anything, but you will eventually have to replace the bag, mop pads, rollers, brush and filter. The detergent tank is refillable with any robot-appropriate liquid.

A big part of what makes the X50 great is brought over from previous Dreame models, including incredible mapping performance and an app that, I think, is the industry’s best. While some robots demand a perfect initial mapping run and get confused if things change, the Dreame bot explores new areas it finds and melds them to the map. If you put it down in a random spot, it will always know where it is, and it automatically turns on its headlight in the dark. Most impressively, if you open the app while it’s running you can even watch where it goes in real time, what it’s doing and if it’s adding new map data.

This robot also has the most impressive obstacle avoidance I’ve seen, managing to dodge the kinds of things other robots always grab if they’re left on the ground; cables, bags with drawstrings, Pokemon cards. If you allow it to take pictures it will send them to you in the app, and you can tell it to stop avoiding that particular obstacle if it’s misidentified it.

Within a year, home robots will surely have new tricks. Dreame itself has shown off a model with a big robotic arm, so it can pick up and move certain obstacles from its way. (No word on whether it will bring you a Coke from the fridge.) But for now, this is the cream of the crop.

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